ПОСАДКА В ТУМАНЕ | АЭРОДРОМ «СВЕТЛЫЙ» | МИСТИКА

Our content is for entertainment purposes only. All stories are fictitious, any coincidences are purely coincidental. We do not provide advice or training. October 1977, northern Krasnoyarsk Krai, at the Svetly departmental airfield used by a geological exploration expedition. Night-shift controller Mikhail Andreevich Kornev, forty years old, a former military air traffic controller, is on duty. It's night, low clouds, fog is settling on the runway—visibility is less than two hundred meters, the airfield is closed, all aircraft are on the ground. At 3:20 a.m., Kornev hears a call on an old frequency, long abandoned: an aircraft is requesting landing, call sign "twenty-one." The voice is calm and clear, introducing itself as the commander of an Li-2, the tail number is old. Kornev checks the flight schedule—there are no aircraft in the air, nor can there be any. But the voice insistently and calmly repeats the request, states the remaining fuel, reports that they are operating on instruments, asks for clearance, and asks for runway lights. Kornev, obeying his controller's instincts, turns on the lights and opens a corridor. The roar of engines can be heard in the fog—the sound of a piston-engine aircraft, the likes of which haven't landed at Svetly Airport in twenty years. The plane comes in, touches down, rolls along—the sound fades at the far end. Kornev runs out onto the runway with his light. It's empty. Fog, wet concrete, no plane, no trace. In the morning, Kornev looks up the airfield archives. He finds: in October of 1957, exactly twenty years ago, on a similarly foggy night, an Li-2 with the call sign "twenty-one," carrying geologists and mail, fell three hundred meters short of the runway and crashed into the taiga. The crew and passengers died, the bodies were recovered, but the wreckage remained. The captain of that plane had the same name as the night voice. Kornev writes a report, the report is filed, and then hushed up. Since then, every year in October, on a foggy night, Flight Twenty-One contacts the station again and requests a landing. Kornev turns on his lights and gives them clearance each time, because he understands the commander simply wants to finally land. Kornev works at Svetly until his retirement. He passes on one instruction to his replacement: if Flight Twenty-One requests a landing at night in the fog, give them their lights. Don't argue, they're ours. In 2015, Kornev's grandson, while sorting through his grandfather's archive, found a notebook with eighteen entries—one for each year, each with a single line: "Flight Twenty-One landed. Crew home."