LII/NPO Energiya crews

Internal documents obtained by the authors show that there was fierce debate between LII/MAP and NPO Energiya/MOM in the 1980s over crewing for the first manned missions. It was all very reminiscent of similar disagreements between the Korolyov design bureau and the Air Force over crewing for Voskhod and Soyuz missions in the 1960s. The documents show that the Council of Chief Designers decided on 26 January 1983 to assign only LII test pilots to the first two manned Buran missions, but that NPO Energiya disagreed with the plan in September 1983, putting forward its own flight engineers to occupy the second seat. By the autumn of 1985 NPO Energiya had mustered enough support to secure a joint decision from MOM, MAP, and the Ministry of Defense on the formation of four preliminary crews for the first two manned flights:

Somewhat later the pairings were changed as follows:

Volk Levchenko Stankyavichus Shchukin

Ivanchenkov Strekalov Balandin Krikalyov

Another source claims the crews initially were Volk-Ivanchenkov, Levchenko – Strekalov, Stankyavichus-Balandin, and Shchukin-Lebedev, with Lebedev being replaced by Krikalyov in 1986 [45].

On 6 December 1985 the Military Industrial Commission (VPK) went along with the plan, ordering formation of final crews by December 1986 based on the training results obtained by then. The first phase of training for the NPO Energiya engineers would see theoretical, simulator, and aircraft training. LII demanded that the flight engineers fly a total of 398 hours on five different aircraft, but in the end five engineers (Ivanchenkov, Strekalov, Balandin, Krikalyov, and Lebedev) accumulated just 11 hours of flying time during 26 flights on four aircraft in November 1986. In June 1987 Volk and Ivanchenkov flew 10 different landing profiles on the PDST simulator at NPO Molniya, which according to Volk’s official protocol showed that the engineers would not be able to safely land Buran in case of an emergency.

Based on the preliminary results of the training program, both MAP and the Air Force recommended in 1987 only to fly experienced LII test pilots on the first Buran missions. With their limited aircraft training, the engineers were not even considered capable of flying in the co-pilot seat of the Tu-154LL training aircraft or the BTS-002. Although the prime landing mode even for manned missions was automatic, MAP and the Air Force argued that the crew would have to take manual control if they were diverted to an emergency landing site not equipped with the necessary navigation equipment to support hands-off landings. Moreover, it was felt that the second crew member needed flying skills equal to those of the commander in order to deal with various off-nominal scenarios. Among those were malfunctions in the commander’s flight displays and control panels and a situation where the commander was partially disabled by space motion sickness. A joint LII/TsPK research program called “Dilemma” had shown that the engineers would not be able to render the necessary assistance to the commander in case of these and other emergencies.

Predictably, NPO Energiya and MOM, citing the December 1985 VPK decision, ignored the conclusions of MAP and the Air Force and insisted on a continued training program for the engineers, including simulated flights on the PDST simu­lator and real flights on the Tu-154LL and BTS-002. One of the arguments in favor of including a flight engineer on the first manned flight (then scheduled to be mission 1K2) was that it would be a conservative 3-day flight, with most systems operating in the automatic mode. On the other hand, LII used the same argument to claim that the limited engineering tasks planned for the flight might just as well be performed by a test pilot. At any rate, the Council of Chief Designers ordered on 23 March 1988 to draw up a new training schedule for the NPO Energiya engineers, but it looks as if NPO Energiya pursued its plans with less vigor as the months went on. The launch date for the first manned mission kept slipping and the exact flight plan remained vague, complicating the formation of a training program. Moreover, by the end of the 1980s virtually all of the NPO Energiya flight engineers involved in Buran had

either been reassigned to the Mir program or left, with only Ivanchenkov remaining until 1992 [46].

In later interviews the LII pilots did not hide their opposition to Energiya’s push to include engineers in the first crews. Volk said that at one point he went to Minister of General Machine Building Oleg Baklanov, asking him what the use of flying engineers was. According to Volk, Baklanov quoted Glushko as saying that “they would keep an eye on the devices.’’ Losing his temper in a subsequent argument with Glushko over the crew assignments, Volk told the chief designer: “Then let Strekalov and Ivanchenkov fly! And if there is a crash or whatever, then of course the news will be all over the world’’ [47].