Oleg Grigoriyevich Kononenko

Oleg Grigoriyevich Kononenko (August 16, 1938 – September 8, 1980) was a member of Soviet cosmonaut group LII-1. He was born in the village of Samarskoye, in Rostov, Russia, then part of the Soviet Union. He graduated from Zhukovsky Air Force Institute in 1975. On July 12, 1977, he was selected for cosmonaut training as a pilot of the Buran space shuttle. He survived an aircraft ejection on the Soviet aircraft carrier Minsk on December 27, 1979. Kononenko was married three times and had four children. He was killed on September 8, 1980, in the crash of a Yakovlev Yak-38 VTOL fighter on takeoff from the Minsk in the South China Sea.