Homemade Plane for Flight from the USSR – Yerevan, 1973

It was in 1973 when people found a crashed plane in the southwest of Yerevan near Sovetashen (Nubarashen). Some suggested that the plane belonged to foreigners who had illegally crossed the state border with not entirely good intentions.

However, operational investigations by the security authorities showed that the plane was homemade – moreover, made on the spot. It turned out that four citizens of Soviet Armenia, using only the Soviet scientific journal “Young Technician” which described an aircraft construction scheme, tried to make a homemade aircraft and cross the Armenian-Turkish border.

The “experts” chose an abandoned warehouse in Nubarashen as the place to build the aircraft where they brought parts and equipment needed for the aircraft at night.

Interestingly, experts subsequently discovered that the plane was built perfectly. Everything was calculated correctly except for the direction of the wind during take-off, which is what has caused the accident.

The head of the group of aircraft builders and the ideologist of flight to Turkey on a homemade plane was Henrik Arakelyan. He has been engaged in foreign exchange trade in the Soviet Union which then was a criminal activity.

Henrik managed to accumulate a sufficiently large wealth which he could not use in the Soviet Union and thus had to export it from the country. And in order to leave the country, he needed a homemade plane.

Service of National Security of Armenia