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A recent dialog with a guy from England prompted me to look in to my archive (not really large one, don’t you think it is a ‘coffer of treasure ), and retrieve from there a few old photographs dated early 80s, when I attended and graduated a flight college in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.

I went through the college’s main course from 1979 to 1983, - four years and two months before I graduated, and moved then to a city of Kazan where I ‘was assigned‘ my first flying job. Well, we lived in the Soviet Union, - see what I’m saying? - that was a deal. The state trained you, - for free - and wanted you to go and work at the places where they wanted you. However, the job was sort of guaranteed, and there was always some degree of ‘flexibility’ too: they didn’t literally ‘chain you up‘, - in fact, if you had a wish to go to other place, or if you didn’t like the place you supposed to go to, you could be able to change the ‘assignment‘. It might require a bit of hassle with the paper work, and dealing with bureaucrats in offices, but at the end of the day you had means to ‘influence on your fate’. Well, all this stuff was a kind of ‘norm’ in the SOVIET SOCIALISTIC SOCIETY

Almost all of us were graduating as the ‘Yak-40’s First Officers‘ - it was a standard, an objective that the Ministry of Civil Aviation in the USSR set as a goal before the newly emerged type of training institutions in the industry. There were about 270 of us, ‘graduates of the Year 1983′, and, by the way, this September our guys are going to reunion for celebrating the 25th anniversary. It should take place at Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.

Of course, as a part of that ‘deal’ you were getting a diploma, - which may be recognized as an equivalent of ‘Bachelor of Science’ by Western standards, and a pilot license. As I mentioned above, the Aktyubinsk Flight College was a new type of civil aviation training school established in the Soviet Union in the middle 70s. The Ministry of Civil Aviation explored a new concept of ‘ab-initio‘ colleges, where they train students from ‘zero time’ to a minimum standard of experience that would allow a graduate to start his career (sorry, ladies, - there’s no sense to put ‘or her‘ to finish the sentence, for then and there it was the ‘100% male environment’ ) on the turbine equipment from the scratch. Therefore, the ‘newbie’ was given an advantage in the way he could move up the career ladder faster than a pilot trained and ‘brought up’ under the traditional system (HERE I was taking about it). In other words, ultimately they wanted younger captains on big Ilyushins and Tupolevs!

As it turned, I got even a better deal I earned a chance to get a transitioning training on Tu-134 immediately, upon graduating the college. The condition was: ‘good academic and flying progress all over the course’, and - ‘good luck’

So, my first job was on the Tu-134. A graduate, with one hundred and some plus flight hours under the belt.. on a quite serious jet.. That was FUN!

(to be continued..)