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Here’s a short note on a subject of bush flying in Russia, some related terminology, and its etymology.

First of all, in Russia they hardly ever used the term itself - ‘bush flying’. I recently had a fruitful conversation with a gentleman, a researcher from Saint Petersburg (Russia) who works on the field of aviation history. He recalls an occasion when he and his colleagues, while studying some historic publications (among other things the materials covered a topic of early bush flying in North America), have faced with the need to interpret into Russian an array of terms related to a notion of ‘bush flying’ (‘bush pilots’, ‘bush flying’, ‘bush’, etc..) He says they had even launched a dedicated discussion on one of the aviation forums, and eventually come up with a more or less adequate version in Russian.

So, the consensus was that the most equal Russian ‘bush terminology’ should be construed around the word ‘taiga’, which, as you know, defines a name of the vast, remote areas covered by ‘boreal forest on continents of North America, and Eurasia’. Needless to mention that Siberian taiga alone accounts for 19% of the world’s forested area and possibly 25% of total forest volume.

Although the ‘bush type of flying’ in North America, for example, not necessarily, or exclusively refers to operating over the ‘taiga landscape’, and constitutes rather a much greater scope, the Russian ‘collective wisdom’ has however suggested that the word ‘taiga’ must be put into context. Respectively, the ‘bush pilot’ was translated into “Таёжный пилот” - ‘Tayezhny Pilot’, i.e., - ‘taiga pilot’. Note that the Russian taiga (“Тайга”) has the same meaning, phonetically it spells similarly, though in Cyrillic (and pronounced with a good Russian accent ).

I think it makes some sense. The point is that to date Russians haven’t come up with any concise term that would as succinctly, wholly (and ‘catchy’, too) call ‘the name of the game’ as the ‘bush-based’ terminology does it here, in North America. You may wonder why wouldn’t they just end up using the literally translated word ‘bush’ for their purposes.. not to mention the fact that at times you can even hear it from Russian pilots flying in remote regions. Occasionally they refer to it as to “Летать по кустам” (‘L’yetat’ po koostam’), which literally means ‘to fly by the bush’.

But this ‘fly-by-the-bush’, uttered in conversation between Russian airmen would sound rather disparagingly, as an element of the limited usage slang, a mocking remark made during an informal pilot banter, and in its significance it is not anywhere near to the ‘bush flying’ references in English speaking countries, where the collective attributes of these terms have long been transformed into a sort of broad cultural connotation.

Sometimes in Russia you could hear other ‘bush’-related references that would rather point specifically at the locales where such operations take place. Noticeable are the following:

1. pointing at the North: “Северные летчики” (‘Severnye Letchiki - ‘Northern Fliers’)
2. or of both, the North and the South poles: “Полярные летчики” (‘Polyarnye Letchiki’ - ‘Polar Fliers’).

These implications are quite common and well known, but yet, - they don’t achieve the level of wholeness and totality that would give them the right to pretend on a status of the most general, most universal name.

Notwithstanding this language peculiarity, the ‘genuine bush flying’ - denoting the same thing as it is known in North America - did exist in Russia since the ’salad days’ of aviation. However, in a sustained way this type of operation was established a little bit later - in the 20s and the 30s, as the government of the first communist state in the world began nurturing strategic plans of tremendous proportion considering the country’s future and its development. And this social and historic circumstance had had a few profound effects on how the Soviet/Russian bush aviation was evolving since its very beginning, and from that time forth.