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A few days ago we were tasked with bringing one of our ‘tail numbers’ down to the ‘Cascade Aerospace’ facilities in Abbotsford for a due maintenance check. After finishing a quick procedure of transferring the plane to a Cascade technician team, two of us, the flight crew - and the only occupants on board of this flight - started to walk our way out of the premises. A hotel transport was already waiting for us outside.. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

You have to be genuinely resourceful if you ‘do stuff’ in the remoteness of bush. And if you’ve got a ‘bad day’, and got into a kind of emergency and, as a result, ended up with a sure chance to become stranded in the wilderness for a while, I’ll bet you do everything, employ all your ingenuity to get yourself out of the dire situation. Read the rest of this entry »

As I keep drafting these notes for a future work tentatively called here ‘Bush Operation on both sides of Arctic’, somehow it occurred to me that a ‘drafter would probably miss a point’ unless he gives a quick outlook of existing ‘bush environment types’. Apparently, the kinds of landscape over which the operation takes place will define some essential traits characteristic to a particular case. 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 »

That’s it. I’ve had enough. I got tired of pointless waiting. I grew worn of futile dreams in which I’d all but crave, hopelessly, for ’some time’, in ’some indefinite future’..  Nah, forget it, - I want it now!  So, I’ve decided to get my own An-2 on floats!

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It was a nice surprise to find this book in my mailbox at a company’s ‘crew room’. A friend of mine, one of our pilots, left it there, signed: “it was pleasure to fly with you”. Recently we worked together, and, as it turned, after a few short minutes of usual ’small talk’, both of us quickly found a turf of common interest laying in the subject of bush flying. His dad, by the way, was mentioned in the book, for he was one of the prominent aviators opening up the province’s North for exploration and development. Read the rest of this entry »

Valentin, a friend of mine, an ex-helicoter pilot from Siberia, and a former flight college mate, has just granted an access to his photo-archive. I almost have no words to express how much I appreciate such a deed on his part, and - how excited I am.. He has accomplished an effort of epic proportion, having scanned old negatives. And then he, driven by his good faith, uploaded them on the Internet. 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 »