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Thanks to the Internet, in recent years I re-established connections with two of the other three guys (myself is second from the left). Moreover, a daughter of the guy staying on the right visited us last year here, in Canada.

Here we are: young, happy, eager to start a ‘pilot&engineer’ course at the Aktyubinsk Civil Aviation College. Just minutes before a moment taken on the picture we had been released from a joining ceremony.

We have become ‘КУРСАНТЫ‘, or, COURSANTS. I’m not sure if there’s such a word in use in the contemporary English, and I am not here to claim the new one, but it should be a compound word, with a ‘COURSE’ in the stem, and ‘-ANT’ as the suffix. A COURSANT is generally ‘a person attending COURSES’, especially, in the military training establishments, or, if this is with regard to the civilian application, it is used as a generic term for attendees of aviation or marine school courses. A CADET is, probably, the closest English equivalent in these semantics.

By the way, this word, COURSANTS, means a lot in the world of aviation in the countries of the former USSR. It is like a cornerstone in the ’system of notions’, a core meaning of the aviation culture. At the same time this word is very rich of content. Just by merely saying ‘I’m a coursant’, you are passing a lot of information to those who ‘know the system’. And if you go a bit further, like, - ‘I’m a coursant of a so-and-so school or college’, - a person familiar with the matter are getting a whole ‘package’ of information about your current activities, lifestyle, prospectives, a circle of persons you are dealing with on the daily basis.

(To be continued..)