Larisa Savitskaya’s incredible survival after a plane crashed from 5,200 meters

The road home from their honeymoon was the last moment newlyweds Larisa and Vladimir Savitsky spent together. On August 24, 1981, a plane crash over Zavitinsk separated them forever. The tragedy claimed the lives of 37 passengers, leaving Larisa as the sole survivor.

Larisa Savitskaya is known worldwide for her miraculous survival after falling from a height of 5200 meters. The Soviet Union often concealed such disasters, and the 1981 Zavitinsk, Russia, crash was no exception. For years, Larisa’s story remained untold.

Today, thanks to various interviews, we can recount the harrowing tale of “the luckiest girl on Earth.”

The tragic road home

Newlyweds Larisa and Vladimir Savitsky were returning from their honeymoon on an An-24 passenger plane from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchenskaya. The flight was smooth, and there were no signs of trouble.

However, at 5200 meters, the aircraft collided with a Tu-16K military plane. The explosion turned the An-24 into a falling heap of metal, scattering fragments over the taiga.

As Savitskaya said after the tragedy, the plane was half empty, which is why all passengers were asked to move to the front rows. Larisa and Vladimir refused this and, on the contrary, moved to the vacant seats in the back. At the moment of the tragedy, the very chair on which Larisa was originally sitting tore apart and flew down with terrible force.

At the moment of the explosion, Larisa Savitskaya woke up in her chair from a strong shock and an incredibly high temperature. Not hoping for any special success, the girl decided to repeat the action of the heroine from the soviet film who survived the plane crash and pressed herself tightly into the chair.

And the reception was truly a success – by a happy coincidence, the part of the plane where Larisa was sitting landed on the ground, softening the fall with the crowns of trees. However, the blow was still significant – Savitskaya lost consciousness and woke up only five hours after the incident.

When authorities learned about the plane crash, rescue efforts were announced. But they were looking primarily not for people, but for secret documents that a military bomber could transport.

It was believed that such an accident was simply impossible to survive, which is why all 38 passengers and crew members of the two aircraft were declared dead.

The incident was kept as secret as possible – according to some reports, in the villages located near the crash site, telephone communications were blocked so that local residents would not “share too much” to their friends and relatives from other regions.

Alone in the forest

Having come to her senses, Larisa realized that only she managed to survive. Suffering from extreme thirst, the girl found a small puddle of clean water and drank from it. Savitskaya did not want to eat – the shock and fear of the experience dulled the need for food.

Wild animals, of which there were many in the taiga, were especially dangerous. The girl admitted that she heard the growls of bears at night, but she simply did not have the strength to be afraid of them. To a greater extent, Larisa was tormented by mosquitoes, which covered the victim from head to toe and disturbed her with maddening ringing sounds.

Savitskaya spent the first two days next to the wreckage of the plane. At some point, she noticed a helicopter in the sky and began waving at it with all her might. However, there was no reaction – the girl was mistaken for an ordinary expedition member.

With five injuries to her spine, a broken arm, ribs and a concussion on the third day, Larisa still went looking for help.

Having walked a little through the taiga, Savitskaya realized that getting lost in it is much easier than finding people. Then the girl returned to a familiar place in the wreckage of the plane. Soon rescuers arrived there.

Unexpected Rescue

As it turned out, they went in search of Larisa only after they were missing one corpse. Imagine the surprise of the rescuers when, after three days of searching, they suddenly discovered a surviving 20-year-old student among the rubble.

Larisa Savitskaya was urgently evacuated. To do this, in the area where the girl was, they began to cut down the birch trees – it was necessary to land a plane there.

By that time, the victim was no longer able to walk on her own. As she said several years after the tragedy in one of her interviews, the moment she saw people, her strength left her body – her body felt that help had arrived and relaxed.

Larisa was taken by helicopter to the nearest hospital in the city of Zavitinsk – where the girl was immediately admitted to intensive care. X-rays taken at a medical facility showed no serious damage.

Larisa’s ribs and arm were bandaged and she was discharged from the hospital. After that, the girl, along with her grandfather and his comrades, went by car to a large hospital in the city of Blagoveshchensk.

The next medical institution provided more thorough treatment. The girl was admitted to the traumatology department, she was given IVs and a reclinator was installed.

At the same time, Larisa did not receive psychological support from specialists, nor did she receive official disability due to a combination of injuries.

All the state got away with for such a catastrophe was a payment of 75 rubles (today it’s about $600), which was ridiculous even at that time. Such a tiny payment helped Larisa get into the Guinness Book of Records as the person who was paid the most meager compensation for a plane crash.

For a long time, the newspapers did not write about what happened – the plane crash was completely classified. Information about what happened in the Amur forest in August 1981 began to appear only in the 2000s. Then Larisa was told about the official reasons for the disaster.

Among them were: dispatcher errors on the part of both aircraft; inaccurate transmission by the An-24 crew of information about evading the route; untimely report of a military aircraft gaining altitude.

In 2021, Larisa’s story was made into a film after much persuasion. By then, her life had transformed—she remarried, became a psychophysiologist, and had a child in 1986. Today, she and her husband run a company selling polygraphs.