Upon finishing the short term service in “Morskaya Aviatsiya’ Yuri was about to look into his near future as a ‘civilian’. He got experience flying bombers (he was a little bit short of one thousand hours on the Tu-16 logged in three years), and it might be regarded as valuable, but at that time such a career development wasn’t a sort of typical, and in his case he needed to get through a few ‘Red Tapes’ in order to convert his military credentials so that they would satisfactory fit for the civilian flying job requirements.
I don’t know exactly how he did it, but everything had eventually worked for him just fine, and in a year after his release from the military he landed a job - quite a job, in fact! - to fly the… civilian version of the familiar ‘Badger’! He was hired by the then-Aeroflot’s division in Novosibirsk for a First Officer position on Tu-104, a Soviet jet air transport pioneer, a legendary ‘Stallion, - that’s how some airmen would call the Tu-104 for a row of associated qualities.
(To be continued..)
November 10th, 2007 at 8:12 am
[…] I wrote before, my second cousin Yuri used to fly this type for a few years after he accomplished a short term contract in Soviet Air Force flying the […]