At nine minutes past four on the afternoon of 10 February 1995, over the flat winter fields of Borodianka Raion northwest of Kyiv, two aircraft that were meant to be flying together came fatally too close. One was the first prototype of the Antonov An-70, a brand-new heavy transport plane on which years of design work and national aviation pride had been staked. The other was an An-72, a smaller jet flying alongside as a chase and support aircraft for the test. In an instant, formation flying became catastrophe. The An-70 came down, and all seven people aboard were lost. The An-72, damaged, managed to limp back and land safely at Hostomel. What was supposed to be a proving flight became a day of mourning.
Test flying is among the most demanding work in aviation. The people who do it climb into machines that have never been fully proven, precisely so that the flaws can be found before ordinary passengers or crews ever board. The seven aboard the An-70 that day were doing exactly that - pushing a new aircraft through its early paces, trusting their skill and their instruments in a plane still learning to fly. When the collision came, all seven were killed. An obituary published soon afterward in the Ukrainian journal Aviatsiya i Vremia carried a photo gallery of the crew, a small act of remembrance for men whose names belonged to the close world of Ukrainian aviation. They died in the service of a program meant to advance flight itself.
The two Antonov aircraft were flying in coordination - the An-72 assisting the An-70 through its test regime, a common and necessary practice, but one that leaves no margin for error. Aircraft flying in close formation depend utterly on precise, disciplined maneuvering; the space between them is measured in feet and seconds. On this flight, that discipline failed. The Ukrainian-led commission that investigated the crash concluded the cause was human error, pointing to the flight maneuvers of the crews as the major factor. Leonid Berestov summed up the finding bluntly: the careless actions of both crews in their formation flying led to the collision and the crash. It was not the machine that failed first, the investigators judged, but the choreography of two aircraft too near one another.
The accident did not come without hints of trouble. The An-70 was still very early in its life - this was the first prototype, and it had made only a handful of test flights before the fatal one. Those earlier flights had not been trouble-free. Investigators noted that flight control problems had appeared during the second test flight, and again during the third, which took place the very day before the collision. Whether those issues bore directly on the crash or simply reflected the ordinary risks of a new design being wrung out, they underscore how unforgiving the work was. Every early flight of a prototype is a question posed to an untested machine, and the answers do not always arrive gently.
The crash gave a quiet corner of Kyiv Oblast an unexpected place in aviation history. Borodianka Raion, spread across the plains west of the capital, lies within reach of Hostomel Airport - itself long associated with the Antonov design bureau and its enormous aircraft. It was to Hostomel that the wounded An-72 returned to land. For the An-70 program, the loss was a heavy blow, though not a final one; the aircraft's development would continue in the years that followed. But for the fields near Borodianka, and for those who remember the seven who died there, the tenth of February 1995 remains a day when the sky claimed a crew doing dangerous, essential work in the name of flight.
The collision occurred near 50.744 N, 29.922 E over Borodianka Raion, Kyiv Oblast, on the plains northwest of Kyiv. The disabled An-72 recovered to Hostomel Airport (Antonov Airport, UKKM) nearby. From cruising altitude in clear weather, the flat agricultural landscape and scattered villages of the region are visible; Kyiv's Boryspil (UKBB) and Zhuliany (UKKK) airports lie to the southeast. There is no memorial structure to overfly - this is a place remembered for what happened in its air rather than on its ground.