Excellent vintage photo from Valentin’s collection showing a Mil-4 helicopter sitting on a rocky plateau (looks to me, an engine is still running), and you can also see the mountain ‘Narodnaya’, a highest peak in the Ural Mountains. It is 1895 m (6217 ft) tall. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a map of Arctic. The one in which you could literally see ‘both sides of it’, as if you ’soar over the top of world’. I’ve got this picture by scanning a page in an old Soviet atlas, published in 1985. By the way, this year bears some significance in respect (how it would turn out later) - to the fates of the world’: ‘Perestroika’ was officially ’spinned-off” then, and in the following years this same world has changed unprecedentedly. Read the rest of this entry »
Again, another ’sporadic photo-session’ happened, as I drove to work. Impossible to miss such an ‘eye catching look’ 
Wondering, where did this plane come from, what skies, over what ‘uncharted’ lands it was flying.. Read the rest of this entry »
So, here’s an ‘excerpt’ from ‘Arctic Chapter’ of Greg’s ‘Antarctica Files’, as it written by Greg himself. See also a previous post with some sort of ‘preface’ to it.
I went through my log books to get more detail on where those photos were taken, but I didn’t keep much detailed information, I don’t know exactly where all the photos were taken for example, but made a pretty good guess.
Photo 1. Taken in the central Arctic on a flight from Resolute Bay to Inuvik. I surprised at this polar bear.. Read the rest of this entry »
“Uh, it’s so much better here!”, I though as we got inside, away from cold, into a warm lobby at the ‘Stanford Inn’. A few minutes passed before I had entirely shaken off some ’stiffness in body parts’ acquired during a brief but overwhelming exposure to ‘minus 38 C’ outside, and started relaxing. As my crew mates were checking in at the front desk, I filled leisure minutes by casual observation of the hotel’s interior. Read the rest of this entry »
A good news came from Russia. I’m in a search for more information now, but it seems they’ve brought one old aircraft restoration project to final stages of completeness. Quite an accomplishment, especially when you bear in mind the fact the General Aviation legislation environment existing in Russia is far from being ‘cozy’ and friendly toward the groups of aeronautical enthusiasts emerged there since the Soviet Union collapse. Read the rest of this entry »
Russian TV channel ‘NTV’ runs an interesting project called ‘Aviators‘. We watch this show at home via the Internet TV provider. I put here a few frames from footage of a recent episode about Russian/Soviet aviation in Antarctica. As you’ve been able to see for the date, I’m pursuing this theme in a category ‘Antarctica: Greg’s Files‘. Read the rest of this entry »
A while ago I started a theme of Arctic and Antarctic exploration on this blog, and christened it ‘Antarctica: Greg’s files’. Now how my own virtual ‘polar exploration’ goes, - it seems like it has gone far beyond the material which laid originally under the grounds for this topic. Then it all began from the three photo-albums belonging to Greg, one of our pilots. Greg worked for ‘Kenn Borek’ before joining our company, and he flew the Twin Otters over both ‘caps of the World’. Read the rest of this entry »
Good stuff! Andrei, a friend of mine, responded. Again, we never met in person, and our acquaintance happened on the Internet. And I’m not going to do a comment on how those ‘myspace-style wonders’ work.. It’s been already written and said a lot on their account as they are more and more becoming ubiquotious things, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »
Neat picture! I’ve got my hand on it courtesy of a friend, who used to be a ‘polarny letchik‘, a ‘polar flyer’. In Russia they use this name (instead of generalized term ‘bush pilot’) for identifying a type of airmen involved in flying up in the Arctic, or down in the Antarctic. I never met this friend of mine in life, we had just bumped into each other on the Russian language equivalent of ‘MySpace‘. Read the rest of this entry »
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