1978 Iranian Chinook shootdown
The 1978 Iranian Chinook shootdown was an incident on 21 June 1978, when four Boeing CH-47 Chinooks of the Imperial Iranian Air Force strayed into Soviet airspace during a training mission, with the result being that two of them were shot down by the PVO. Shootdown During the 1970s, numerous incidents, probably including Project Dark Gene occurred on the Soviet-Iranian and Afghan-Iranian border, causing the Soviets to station a regiment of MiG-23s at Ak-Tepe Air Base, near the border with Afghanistan, in what was then the Turkestan Military District. One of the most serious of these occurred in the early morning of 21 June 1978, at 06:21 AM, when a Soviet radar site near the village of Bagir, not far from Ashkabad, detected four slow-moving contacts which came from Pahlavi Iran and penetrated 15 to 20 kilometers into the Soviet airspace near Dushak, in Turkmenistan. Five minutes later, these targets were detected by the radar site of Ak-Tepe Air Base, and the deputy commander of the 152nd IAP, Lt.Col. J. A. Miloslavsky, ordered one MiG-23M, flown by Capt. A. V. Dem'janov, to scramble. Once over the area, Dem'janov found only one helicopter, but misidentified it as a friendly Mil Mi-6.