Aeroflot Flight 6833

Aeroflot Flight 6833, en route from Tbilisi, Georgian SSR, to Leningrad, Russian SFSR, with an intermediate stop in Batumi, was the scene of an attempted aircraft hijacking by seven young Georgians on 18–19 November 1983. The crisis ended with a storming of the Tu-134A airliner by Alpha Group that resulted in eight dead. The surviving hijackers were subsequently tried and executed.

Incident

On 18 November 1983 seven young people, all sons of Georgian intellectual elite families, attempted to flee the Soviet Union by hijacking an airliner of the state-run Aeroflot company. Among the hijackers were the painters Gia Tabidze, Davit Mikaberidze, and Soso Tsereteli, the actor Gega Kobakhidze (who had just been selected to play a role in Tengiz Abuladze's subsequently famous film Repentance), and the physicians Paata and Kakhi Iverieli. They pretended to be a wedding party, boarded the airliner in Tbilisi, and tried to divert it to Turkey. There were 57 passengers and seven crew members on board.

The captain, Akhmatger Gardapkhadze, and the co-pilot, Vladimir Gasoyan (both of them were subsequently awarded the titles of the Hero of the Soviet Union) made sharp maneuvers to prevent the hijackers from taking aim. The hijackers were forced out of the flight deck but several people were injured in a clash. Rather than concede to the hijackers' demands, the pilot circled Tbilisi and later landed.

The Georgian Communist Party chief, Eduard Shevardnadze, called for the deployment of an elite Soviet special unit Alpha Group from Moscow. On day two of the hijacking the Alpha group stormed the aircraft and arrested the surviving hijackers. The incident claimed the lives of three crew members, two passengers and three hijackers. The aircraft received 108 bullet holes during the attack, and because its structure was weakened by the maneuvers that exceeded its design limits, the aircraft was written off.