As I’m looking back into my ’salad days’ I can clearly remember that a ‘desire to fly’, a wish to become a ‘flying man’ came to me quite yearly. I’m able to recall myself thinking of it at an age of five, that’s for sure. Whenever I had a chance to doodle with paper and pencils (have done it occasionally until not long ago) a theme of the aeroplanes and flying was the most favorite;
(This picture of the Yak-18T was drawn in the late 90s, and you can read my comments to it on an old (’an ancient’, in fact:) Internet project me and my son started then) ,
When I went to school I already had an answer for one of the most typical questions the adults always ask kids of that age: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ - ‘A pilot’. Period.
And no kidding, - I got really excited when my cousin Yuri ‘appeared out of the blue’ one day wearing a flying college cadet’s uniform. I was in Grade 5 or, maybe, 6 then, and I didn’t even know that he joined a pilot course in the Krasni Kut flying college. That was a mind-boggling sensation!
He was having a short vacation from the course, and dropped by in our city of Semipalatinsk to see his relatives, us included.
After that memorable meeting we started more or less regular a mail conversation, and I got this picture in one of his letters.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:22 pm
[…] (Read the Part I here) […]