Escape Attempt from the Soviet Union with a Homemade Plane

In 1973, in the southwest of Yerevan, near Sovetashen, locals discovered a crashed plane. Law enforcement agencies soon found out that four citizens of Soviet Armenia had managed to build a plane and attempted to cross the Armenian-Turkish border with it, solely using the Soviet scientific magazine "Young Technician" (Юный техник).

These daring boys had chosen an abandoned warehouse in Nubarashen as the location for creating their flying machine. They transported the necessary parts and equipment for the homemade aircraft during the night.

Investigations revealed that the plane was constructed almost flawlessly. However, something went wrong during takeoff, leading to the crash.

The mastermind behind the escape and the leader of the group was Henrik Arakelyan, who was engaged in foreign currency trading, considered a criminal activity in the Soviet Union. Henrik had managed to accumulate considerable wealth that he couldn't utilize within the Soviet Union, and he needed to get it out of the country.

Since only limited details were revealed by the RA National Security Service in 2019, we can only speculate that the boys were planning to seek political asylum in the USA after reaching Turkey. Typically, those fleeing from the USSR moved westward.

The fate of the boys is clear: success for the victors, judgment for the losers.

By the way, years later, in 1984, Czech citizen Ivo Zdarsky managed to escape from an Iron Curtain country in an aircraft he built himself.".