Soviet MiG-23 flew pilotless across Europe before crashing in Belgium

A Soviet MiG-23M flew unmanned across Warsaw Pact and NATO airspace in the final years of the Cold War before crashing into a house in Belgium, killing one person.

On July 4, 1989, Colonel Nikolai Skuridin took off from Bagicz Air Base near Kołobrzeg, on Poland's Baltic coast, for what the source describes as a routine training flight. The aircraft belonged to the 871st Fighter Aviation Regiment. Seconds after takeoff, while still at low altitude, the pilot heard a loud bang. The afterburner shut down and engine RPM fell rapidly as the jet lost airspeed. The indications pointed to an engine failure, and Skuridin ejected.

The MiG-23, however, kept flying. It continued across Europe, and NATO F-15s were scrambled after the radio-silent intruder ignored airspace warnings. According to the account, the F-15 pilots found an aircraft cruising at 39,000 ft with no one at the controls. The jet eventually came down in Belgium, striking a house and killing one person.

The aircraft was a variable-geometry wing design, known to NATO as the 'Flogger-B', powered by a single Tumansky R-29 turbojet and capable of exceeding Mach 2. The source notes its bort number was 29, carried below the cockpit, and that the type dated to the late 1960s but remained in service within the Soviet military presence in Poland months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.