Paul, a guy from England, who I recently talked to with regard to flying Yak-42 asked a question:
- I just wondered - how does the Yak 42 compare with other a/c you’ve flown? What criticisms, if any, do you have of it?
And I mentioned a few things that would be regarded as disadvantages of this quite decent otherwise machine. Oh, here’s one more: there’s no flight spoilers to kill the lift and increase the rate of descent if you need to (although the aircraft does have ‘ground spoilers’ flipping up automatically after the touchdown). However, there are times when you feel you would love to have them in your disposal, and - ‘now!’ 
One of this occasions may happen when you descend in icing conditions. As the Yak’s Flight Operation Manual says, you have to increase the power to the ‘flight intermediate idle’ when the plane encounters icing in flight, but it is somewhat high power setting, and the plane almost levels off on you, if you elect to maintain the constant speed, - or the speed builds up quite fast, in case you’re trying to maintain the same pitch ‘down’. Anyway, crews worked out a few ‘tricks’ and technics to handle this inconvenience. And I believe, the manufacturer had changed the procedure for descent in icing conditions allowing crews to switch the ‘wing anti-ice OFF’ for the short time, and bring power down to the ‘ground idle’. Certainly, it should work: the rate of descent with engines set on ‘ground idle’ is pretty high.
I’ll talk to my friends who still fly the Yaks to verify the point.
A picture on the top is a scan of an old ‘instant Polaroid’ print, a friend of mine took this shot in flight. I was just a ‘few months old captain’ on the Yak-42, - can you see that ‘happy face’? And would it be like that if the plane you were flying wasn’t a fun?
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