Clashmaker.com

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 »

Another photograph from the ‘Valentin’s depository, ‘AVLUGA file’. It shows a ’sim bay’ at our college in Aktybinsk. These flight training devices had neither ‘motion capability’, nor any kind of visual system to simulate the effects of flight, and the elements of environment, but they did fairly good job when we used them during an introductory training course. Read the rest of this entry »

Just look at that, - it is a moment of real day-to-day life, an episode of very authentic ‘bush operation’ in Siberia! A guy, who posted this image on a Russian aviation forum called ‘aviaforum.ru’,  said the crew of technicians are changing the landing gear on this An-2. Read the rest of this entry »

This picture goes back to the early 80s. Surprisingly how well it turned out, - quite crisp, and in pretty vivid colors. What I did on it in Photoshop was just a minor color/balance correction, and a little bit of retouch to remove a few apparent scratches. Read the rest of this entry »

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’ Read the rest of this entry »

Just got an e-mail from another ‘correspondents’ in Russia. Dima, a guy I’ve been intermittently corresponding with for the last two years, wrote on some achievements he accomplished lately going on the road of ‘career flying’ - a walk of life he began not too long prior to the time we met on the Internet. Right now he’s undergoing a transition course for the Tupolev-154 type rating, and says chances are he might just ’seamlessly’ transfer to another training class - of English, and International flying regulations. Read the rest of this entry »

Planning for the future.. It may set up a day for some pretty good start. For that, I’m flying another Christmas pairing. That’s OK, don’t rush to express your fellow feelings, please I don’t mind working on Christmas at all. Could be simply explained. Fact is, I grew in another culture. Read the rest of this entry »

As it seems, a topic ‘Boeing-727 vs Tu-154′ perfectly fits into the ‘clash thesis‘ actively pursued on this blog, - as a case to explore, of course, - not a pretex for another round of ‘Cold War’ So, I thought it would be worthwhile to continue reviewing some traits of two similar aircraft: Boeing-727, and Tupolev-154. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, well, to be honest, it was not specifically a SNOOKER game that we played back then, during my years in the flight college. As far as I remember, we had fun with some ‘amateurish’ version of BILLIARD. Stakes weren’t too high. Actually, I couldn’t recall if we ever put the money on stake. Maybe, some did. On the quiet. ‘Cause, ‘you never know’.. Lenin was always.. kinda watching us Read the rest of this entry »

“Knowledge is Power”.. Perhaps, many people here in the West have heard this expression, which is a quote from Sir Francis Bacon. What a powerful tool Google is, huh? I should put it honestly, I haven’t known much about Sir Francis Bacon until after I have made a search on this one. However, I heard the name years ago - from a course of history and philosophy (can’t you believe?! -  future pilots attending flight training institutions in the USSR had to satisfactory pass a mandatory course of the ‘Marxist-Leninist Philosophy’ in the educational curricula!) at our flight college. Read the rest of this entry »