Clashmaker.com

At times it occurs to me, why didn’t I write a good post devoted to a first plane I flew commercially.. It was the Tupolev-134, and given all the circumstances surrounding my career transitioning into its right seat, I should summarize it: it was a fairly complicated ‘flying platform for the purposes of continued on-the-job training’

Yes, as I mentioned in one of the previous posts, I got an ‘excellent deal’ upon graduation from the Akyubinsk Civil Aviation Flight College in 1983. Along with the ‘ticket to a profession’, i.e., diploma and license, I was given an opportunity of exercising a really accelerated career start in which you could ‘jump up a few steps on the ladder’, i.e., skip a sizable amount of years of flying on smaller planes, in smaller, and more remote places, and start an airline pilot career immediately, from ‘the scratch’. I was among a couple of dozens of similarly ‘lucky guys’, my college mates, and we were all excited about ‘glorious future waiting for us right around the corner’

Our ‘luck’ wasn’t much of ‘winning a lottery’ case, though. On a personal level, it was more about ‘getting a reward’ for hard working during years in the college. We all graduated with ‘honored diplomas’, and an overall ‘good-to-excellent’ assessments  of the course progress was a determining factor in a selection process for a ‘Tupolev-134 transition group’ assignment.

Certainly, it would be worthwhile to have a retrospective look at how the system worked in those years. I mean, many, many things were different from what people here in the West are used to (regardless, do they like it or not ), and accept as a ‘norm’. Whenever engaged in a ‘pilot-to-pilot chat’, I’m often being asked, “How the Soviets were getting their education and training - generally, and in aviation, particularly?” “How could you get your first job?” “What kind of competition on the job marked a pilot, fresh from the training, would be faced to?”, and so on. For the starters, to clarify many things, it should be said THERE WERE NO MARKET in the Soviet Union, - at least, as an entity, you are accustomed to think of. Surely, it would need a more elaborate essay to have the topic covered, and I’ll keep writing on it.

But let me now just introduce the Tu-134 into a ’sphere of blogging on the Clashmaker’

Here she is, a commercial Tupolev’s ‘by-product’, an embodiment of a plane, the mere look into its features could reveal what a great deal of influence it bears from the ‘design school’ that ‘just began’ its deviation from a long task of building bombers

Maybe not too fast - by the ‘bombers’ standards’ - but still, it was quite fast for a guy just out of the flight college, with a little bit under two hundred flight hours of training on smaller and slower planes. Technically, it sits in a brink between “C’ and ‘D’ approach speed categories, and I’ll find out where exactly it is. Well, a young fellow had certainly to get used to counter-fighting a ’sensation of motion blur’ while approaching runways at 145-150 KTS on a normal day

(to be continued..)