Clashmaker.com

(Continued from HERE)

Hello, my excuses: it’s been a while until I got things together to finish this ‘piece of memoir on flying with Aeroflot’.

So, taxi-out route at Istanbul from the area where we were parked to the departure RW 18R’s threshold was pretty straightforward.

I got an impression of it as a bit of ’sight-seeing tour’

Soon we were in the air. After some straight departure segment we were vectored  to make a turn out to the left. I took a few pictures during the turn.

Istanbul lays on the Sea of  Marmara shores to both sides of Bosporus, which is a natural connector between two seas - ‘Marble’ and ‘Black’.

As we progressed through the left turn, I got a nice a view of  the airport on my side

Ataturk International airport is a large transportation knot in the region, and as they say in Wikipedia, ‘it is projected to be among the top 40 airports in the world in terms of total passenger traffic‘.

I’ve got an image of Jeppesen page with airport diagram on it. It may be out of the date though, since that time. DO NOT USE FOR PURPOSE OF REAL NAVIGATION!

The flight back home was uneventful. I can’t remember even a detail! However we, pilots, often consider this is the ‘best way’ how your day-to-day work may be accomplished

Upon arrival, Sheremetyevo looked even more gray than it did in the morning - dusk was settling down fast.

Pictures turned out ‘fair‘. Although braking action during taxi could be assessed as ‘good‘ :)  I took a quick shot of a Tu-204 in the ‘Rossiya Airlines’ livery. If you follow the link, you can find out a few facts about the company. One of them is that later in the summer of 2004 it was affiliated with ‘Pulkovo Airlines’.

The plane and it crew were done for the day.

One of the flight engineer’s chores is to make sure the plane got the ground power. Normally, aircraft is met by maintenance at the gate or parking spot, and it doesn’t take long to finish post-flights. After a swift passage through border and customs, the crew, accordingly ancient aviation tradition in Russia, has to seat down for a quick ‘debrief’ with the captain who has to put his signature into a specially designated book - merely affirming the fact it has been done, - and THEN you can ‘call it a day’.

So can I