Clashmaker.com

Seems like it was a second picture in a set  taken during the same “photo session” - it shows the time and the date in the lower right corner (the 13th of whatever month..), - a date registering format in the camera is set in such a way that unfortunately there’s no indication of the month and the year. But at least we’ve got the time: it is 9:32..

I’ve brought the first one up again. See,  it was taken just a minute earlier, and it got the three speed indicators in one shot, whereas on the above picture we can see three altimeters!

I can tell from reading the instruments we were flying to the East, past the Russian border with some another country, - the clue is the ‘feet altimeter’, indicating exactly 33.000 feet, or, - FL 330,  - which is a sure sign we had already left the Russian airspace where all aircraft shall maintain the assigned flight level in meters, in our case it could have been 10.100 m.

A 500 m vertical increment for the next flight level starts from the ‘Echelon 8.100 meters’ (the eastbound, or ‘odd echelon’), and up to 12.100. If you want to fly even higher than that going West, you’ll have to be able to gain another thousand meters now, - increment increases as twice.

Over the most Russian territory there’s no designated ‘RVSM airspace‘ - in such a way as it exists over the Europe and North America. However, in order to handle a large volume of domestic and international traffic in some adjacent areas there’s a few ATC zones that recognize and support the ‘RVSM rule’. Certainly, they assign the RVSM flight levels only to the compliant aircraft.

You may also tell from observing these pictures that our Tupolev-154 wasn’t the ‘RVSM approved’ plane. Although there were three altimeters only on the right instrument panel, (and two more - on the left) none of them had the digital encoding capability, - one of the main requirement to flight instrumentation on the RVSM approved aircraft. But the flight was conducted before the implementation of the RVSM requirements in that region where we flew at the time being - most likely, it was over Turkey, or Iran. But I remember the ‘RVSM era’ was coming up on us so fast! There had been so much speculation then over the topic, and, specifically, on ‘why-is-it-upon-us‘! Oh, boy, I’d better shut up now!

Well, here’s a picture taken at another time, on the other company’s Tupolev. This one had already gotten the digital altimeter, and the TCAS as well, in order to operate in European airspace with no restrictions. It was one of the Aeroflot’s Tu-154Ms, similar (or, maybe, even the same one!) to the pictured here

OK, next time I’ll talk about the ‘Soviet RVSM implementation’ that the system underwent through in the middle 80s. Didn’t you ever hear of this?