IHL,
I had the pleasure of meeting some of those Chernobyl pilots, especially Gorgen Karapetyan and Anatoly Greshenko. Quite likely the most heroic pilots I have ever met. And by heroic, I do mean that they simply gave their lives, knowingly, to try and save the lives of thousands. The Mil Bureau management team helped to load the helicopters, and was almost as heavily exposed by the dust they helos brought back. The airframes were buried after the event.
Gorgan described the look of the reactor area as he approached after dark, having been scrambled with his baby, the massive Mil 26. He saw a shimmering beam of blue light extending upward from the exposed reactor core playing on the low clouds like some eerie Hollywood opening. He told me that the radiation in the cockpit was so bad that the digital watches on their wrists stopped. Once he told his CP to turn off the TV tube in the center console because it was so very bright and his CP told him, "It has never been on!" On the first few missions, they got sunburned on the backs of their legs and derriers due to the radiation piercing the aluminum of the aircraft, so they sat on lead sheets afterward. Greschenko paid with his life, having succombed to Lukemia after a struggle with transplants and treatment in the US (organized by my friend Cap Parlier, the project pilot on the Apache.) Gorgan gave me a bottle of Russian Plum Brandy which was reputed to help flush the body of radiation - I still have it, in rememberance. It has a tiny cartoon of an atom on its inscrutable Russian label.
Gorgan wore his "Hero of the Soviet Union" badge on his suit jacket, an award that is not given lightly. As "Bomber" Harris said about the Victoria Cross, it is given for actions that "should not be repeated at frequent intervals."