The tragedy was born on the ground, in a control room stretched past its limits. Both flights were passing through the Kharkiv regional air traffic control center, an area of such dense traffic that a single controller might be juggling more than a dozen aircraft at once. The strain had been a known problem since the early 1970s, discussed but never fixed, and the southwestern sector was notoriously complex and unpredictable. On that afternoon the controller's mental picture of where each plane sat had drifted out of step with reality. When the supervisor glanced at the radar and heard the traffic on the frequency, he grasped the horror of what was unfolding and scrambled to pull the aircraft apart, ordering one flight up to a vacant altitude. The correction came seconds too late, and it sent one aircraft climbing straight into the path of the other.

The two jets came together over Dniprodzerzhynsk, hidden inside cloud, their crossing airways meeting at a steep angle. One aircraft's right wing tore through the forward fuselage of the other, and in an instant the mid-air became a cascade of destruction: tails striking tails, an engine ripping through a keel, wings shearing away. One Tu-134 broke apart and tumbled from the sky at once. The other, gravely wounded and missing much of its tail, one engine, and part of a wing, held together long enough for its pilots to fight for an emergency landing. They nearly bought their passengers a chance. At around 4,000 meters they lost the struggle, and the aircraft went down northeast of the city. No one aboard either plane survived. Investigators found no explosion, no fire, no fault in the machines, only human error in the airspace above.

Aboard one flight, on their way to face Dinamo Minsk, were the footballers of Pakhtakor Tashkent, one of Soviet Central Asia's proudest clubs. Seventeen members of the team died in the sky over Ukraine, a loss so total that the Soviet football authorities ordered every top-league club to give up three players so Pakhtakor could be rebuilt, and shielded the shattered club from relegation for three seasons. Two air traffic controllers were later sentenced to fifteen years for the failures that led to the crash, a legal reckoning that brought little comfort. The grieving has never really ended. A monument stands at Botkin Cemetery in Tashkent, and each August the club holds a youth tournament in memory of the dead. Near the crash site at Kurylivka, thirty years on, a stone swan and a granite football were raised over the players' engraved names, marking the ground where so many young lives came down.