Major Sergey Sahakyan, 38, who was the commander of the Armeian helicopter which Azerbaijan had shot down, has three sons; two twelve-year-old twins, and a two-year-old.  

Sahakyan’s neighbors remembered him as a good neighbor, a patriot, and a man devoted to his work.

“He was a good father, a good husband, a good soldier,” his neighbor Martin Vardayan told Armenian News-NEWS.am. “He worked as a pilot since 1994; he was a master of his job, he dreamt of becoming a pilot since childhood. He was a patriot.”  

The last farewell military ceremony for the three pilots of the downed chopper will be held on Monday. On the next day, their remains will be transferred from the church to Yerablur Military Pantheon in capital city Yerevan, where they will be buried with a military ceremony.

The Azerbaijani armed forces violated the ceasefire and shot down a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) Air Force helicopter on November 12. The chopper was downed during a training flight, and it crashed very close to the Karabakh-Azerbaijan Line of Contact. As a result, three pilots were killed: the commander of the helicopter, Major Sergey Sahakyan, as well as Senior Lieutenant Sargis Nazaryan and Lieutenant Azat Sahakyan.

The adversary, on the other hand, was firing intensive shots toward the crash site, thus, not allowing access to the area.

But the remains of these three military servicemen plus some necessary parts of the chopper were retrieved from the helicopter’s crash site through a special operation by the NKR armed forces. Two Azerbaijani soldiers were neutralized during the operation, but the Armenian side suffered no casualties.  

Video from Armenia TV