Clashmaker.com

We get together tonight, our children ‘are visiting us’, - fairly rare occasion, by the way, - and Victoria has just invited everybody to ‘have a cup of tea’.

So. I’ll be with you in a second. Cup of tea

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned before, my colleagues often ask me about experiences of living in the Soviet Union. Not very often, but once in a while they would shoot a ‘blunt’ question, something like this:

“Was it the state in the Soviet Union that used to make decisions who goes where, and in your example, - whether they had decided that you would go to aviation, or it was your own choice?” Read the rest of this entry »

 (Continued from HERE)

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Night”.. “Light”.. “Flashes in the night”.. “Blinded by the light”..

..and all stuff like that, the old good verbal stuff easily falling into a solid rhyme for a hit song’s lyrics. Anyway, my point is that you could find not too many pilots and flight attendants who do adore the night flying.

Read the rest of this entry »

At last I stepped on the Nevada’s soil. It was rather a fun.

It was never a sort of ‘particular goal’ for me, though, - you know, sometimes people would set up a GOAL for the LIFE , - ‘to do so and so’, or ‘to see so and so’, and only after the accomplishment of such a goal they would reluctantly agree to accept the fact the LIFE is going to end some day.

I flew over Nevada quite a few times already, and whenever I would be over it on my next trip, I would always think about an incredible connection existing between this US State, featured mainly by the sheer desert, and my native Semipalatinsk, the prairie (’Steppe’) surrounding this humble city in the North-East of Kazakhstan - and the thousands and thousands miles that separate these two part of the world.

Oh, well, the distance had been quite ’shortened’ with an advent of the era where the ballistic missiles, had they been lauched right across the North Pole would cover the leg in a less than an hour.

And we, folks, who lived then on both sides of this trans-polar route knew about the nuclear power a little bit more than they would tell us in the newspapers.

Lets talk about the ‘History of a Big Clash’.

It’s time to be on the road again, a five-day pairing, mostly flying out of Toronto..

Just bought a laptop to be connected while on the road, but I’ll take it with me on the next trip.

I promised to post a few images of the Blue Nose, a Canadian marine celebrity, and I’ll do it when I’m back home.

And here is an announce of a new topic tentatively named ‘The Sweet Clash’ which I’m going to make a report about.

A friend of mine Alex was recently an initiator of a ‘historic meeting’ of the Eastern and Western aviation cultures, namely - a WestJet crew and the Ukrainian AeroSvit crew had a very nice and sweet ‘CLASH (that’s what it is all about!) in Toronto. And Alex is going to feed up an account of this meeting.

So, see you, folks, in a few days,

Take care,

C/

(Read the Part I here)

Yuri graduated the Krasni Kut college in the early 70s, and then there was a bit of twist in the beginning of his career.

The Krasni Kut flying college was known as a solid school to train pilots for flying the Antonov-2s, the versatile bi-plane type that was used in many applications all across the vast country. The main chunk of graduates would normally begin their careers as agricultural pilots on the An-2s.

But as an option (which was not a common thing at the time) , he was offered to join a short-term military service to fly the Tupolev-16 (’Badger’) bomber in the ‘Morskaya Aviatsiya’ (Naval Air Force). So, he easily traded off the ‘would-be’ career of the crop-duster for way more serious stuff, and went to serve ‘defending Rodina’ (’Homeland’).

This one is not a picture from other round of our correspondence, but it conveys the idea of environment he was in very well.

I should ask him for pictures of his own.

(continued HERE…)

(Continued from HERE)

Speaking of the plane flying over our neighborhood the other morning, specifically - the WestJet Boeing-737-700, registered as C-GWBN (designated in the company’s inventory as ‘Tail # 235′) I found out later that it was doing Flight 732, from Kelowna, BC to Calgary

Apparently, guys were on the track of HANDA FOUR arrival to RW 34 in Calgary (CYYC), and at the moment I spotted them they were in a right turn over MOGOT, - such would be a funny name for the computer-generated WAYPOINT, - which is in fact just an ‘abstract crisscross’ of specified latitude and longitude on the geo gridlock.

So, there’s NO any really existing ground-based features associated, such as beacons, big granite milestones, or whatever, placed by MOGOT. This thing virtually lives in the FMS (Flight Management System) database only.

But by curious coincidence this MOGOT, if it is pinpointed to the REAL tiny spot on the Earth’s surface, lays just nearby our place.. You know what? - should think about putting on some conspicuous feature to mark the spot

And of course, once in a while I also fly over MOGOT by myself on our way HOME, SWEET HOME..

On the fly-over occasions, not always though, but sometimes I would get a really good chance to make a couple of clear shots of our place.

On that morning, if I had flown the C-GWBN, it would have been just perfect.

(To be continued..)

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.

(Story is continued here…)