Nadezhda Kurchenko
Soviet flight attendant (1950-1970)
Nadezhda Vladimirovna Kurchenko (29 December 1950 – 15 October 1970) was a Soviet flight attendant who tried to prevent the hijacking of Aeroflot Flight 244. Having warned the crew, Kurchenko sought to block the entrance to the cockpit, which at the time was not normally locked. She was killed in a struggle with one of the hijackers.
Kurchenko posthumously received the Order of the Red Banner. A mountain in the Gissar Range, asteroid 2349 Kurchenko, a tanker, a park and a street in Sukhumi were named after her.
Early life
Kurchenko was born in the settlement of Novo-Poltava, Klyuchevsky District, then in Russian SSR. Later her parents moved to the Udmurtian village of Ponino, where she finished boarding school. Kurchenko aspired to enroll in law school, but ultimately became a flight attendant. In 1968 she moved to Abkhazia and worked in the accounting office of the Sukhumi aviation unit.
Death
On 15 October 1970 an Antonov An-24B, servicing Aeroflot Flight 244, left Batumi for Krasnodar. Ten minutes after takeoff, at an altitude of 800 m (2,600 ft), two men called Kurchenko.
The public source identifies “Nadezhda Kurchenko” as soviet flight attendant (1950-1970). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nadezhda, Kurchenko and Soviet.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nadezhda Kurchenko” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.