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  True, after that memorable ‘date’ in Calgary with a Canadian-built, Russian operated Dash-8, I picked up a bit of interest towards knowing more about SAT ‘Sakhalin Airways’. And it wasn’t for too long before some pieces of information started ’seeping through the Internet cobwebs’.

In the end of 2007 I got acquainted with Ivan, an Antonov-24 pilot from Russia who seemed to be rapidly ‘getting prominence’ in circles of the ‘pilots-slash-flight deck photographers’ and spotters - ‘all in one’, - anyone who, may I put it, ‘never forget to take a camera and toss it next to a headset in the flight bag as he goes to fly’ Oh, sure you can instantly recognize the type (’truly yours’ included), if you go and browse their photo-streams, or chat rooms on the dedicated Internet resources.

I liked Ivan’s photos taken during his journeys across Siberia. Some of them were posted on the recognized aviation photography portals, such as airliners.net, planepictures.net. On one particular day, as I was doing another ‘virtual trip across Siberia’, to my surprise I got a glimpse of aforementioned company’s Dash-8s in one of the ‘web corners’ caught in focus of Ivan’s camera.

Ivan took a picture of this RA-67255 in August of 2007, while being at ‘Khomutovo’ (UHSS), a SAT’s  home base airport in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the main city on the island.

Interestingly enough, the RA-67255 (c/n 345), (along with C-FOVR, formerly, ‘RA-67253′, featured in my previous  post on the series) now is back in Canada, and, as well as the C-FOVR, it flies for ‘Canadian North’ bearing an official country’s ‘C-‘ registration (C-GXCN).

Here I can’t help but put a remark that it’s fascinating, how ‘well inter-connected’ through the www and its numerous applications we’ve become in recent years. Writing this post I put ‘c-gxcn’ into the Flickr’s search engine, and it traced down one image taken by ‘jspitfire’, one of my contacts!

Driven by curiosity, I kept searching and talking with people on the Internet. Well, the primary reason was to find out

how the Canadian-made planes are liked, and performing in a country which is well known for its harsh climate

It ended up in establishing communication with a lady who is in charge of public relations matters for the Sakhalin company. She’s just sent me a few more Dash-8 photographs.

I modified this one for Flickr, adding an insert with a fragment of the picture blown-up enough to make one of the plane’s registration eligible.

Although the company has had a three-strong fleet of the Bombardier aircraft to the date, on the picture you can see four of them on a ramp at Sakhalin’s Khomutovo airport. It was only because of the ‘delivery overlap’, with one extra plane bringing the number to four - yet our C-FOVR was seen lined up here, - however, ready for a long trip back to Canada.

As the first leasing contract was nearing its final in the summer of 2007, SAT made a decision to upgrade their Bombardier aircraft fleet by trading off their three DHC-8-100 for the larger, -200 series. Currently they have the whole -200 fleet, and are expecting fourth aircraft, the DHC-8-300, to join the ’squadron’ soon (slated for February, 2009).

Through an existing ‘SAT connection’ I’m looking forward to getting hold of a chief pilot, no less , and then, hopefully, we’ll hear a first-hand opinion based on experiences of flying a classic Canadian regional plane in Russia.

(to be continued..)