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A neat picture of these two - ‘the Yakovlevs brothers’. Isn’t it cool to see such a clear illustration of ‘Perspective‘? On a 2-D pic planes project into images of the same size. A friend of mine who flies out of Domodedovo took this shot.

In the real life there’s a distinct difference in size - and capabilities, of course - for the two.

Compare wing spans:

• Yak-40’s 25 m vs 34.2 meters for the Yak-42,

and MTOWs:

•  16.100 kg (almost 35.700 lbs) for Yak-40, and 56.500 kg (125.300 lbs) - for the Yak-42

We flew Yak-40 in our flight college, it was our ‘graduation plane’. In less than three years since my graduation I got on a right seat of the Yak-42.. “What a quantum leap”! I thought. However, at the time of transition I was rather making comparisons between the new Yaks and the Tu-134, which I had just left. Anyway, a feeling of (at least!) ‘big jump forward‘ was definitely in ‘the air’

Yes, by that time all the youngsters aspiring pilot career had already figured out that getting into one of the so-called ‘ab-initio colleges‘ with the airline-oriented training program was a sure thing for your future career ‘fly towards greater perspectives’.

In the early 80s there were two institutions of this type in the Soviet Union: one was in Aktyubinsk, a city located on the territory of former ‘Kazakh’ Soviet Republic (today it is a newly independent state of Kazakhstan). Another one was set up in Kirovograd, Ukraine (which was also a former Soviet republic at the time).

Soviet Union collapse brought about a shift of tremendous proportion. All 15 republics the USSR was made up, including Russia, in a short period of time around its official dissolution ( Dec., 8, 1991) started claiming their independency. All the ties, that once gripped a whole system together, were cut through, and a process of decomposition had imposed a hefty toll to societies of the newly born independent countries.

Civil aviation in Russia suffered a great lot of ‘ordeal’ too. And it has not been quite through ‘the time of trouble’ yet. One really urgent issue is a lack of qualified pilots to fulfill positions in the airlines that today actively exploit Western built planes.

And as it seems, they are going to stick with long established practice of training pilots in the large, ‘line-oriented’ institutions. But, as a result of the Soviet Union breakup, the two mentioned cities of Aktyubinsk and Kirovograd now belong to their own states, which are foreign to Russia.

Looking for a kind of solution, not too long ago the country’s government and aviation authority decided to set up a pilot training college on premises of the Ulyanovks Civil Aviation Training Center, which was known in the Soviet union time for being an international civil aviation training facility for the Warsaw Pact countries, and other states that used the Soviet built aircraft for their air commerce.

That friend of mine who sent me the Yak pictures is a young fellow, a recent graduate of the Ulyanovsk. And he flies Boeing-737 from the very beginning of his career, - as many of his mates do too. I found it very interesting to communicate with a person who put himself into the same walk of life, in a set of similar circumstances, but ‘one generation up’.

I’m intrigued to know, what kind of perspective he sees now from his point of view? For himself, and for the country, - that’s the question.