As I continued browsing through pictures taken at Oshkosh, I grew more and more curious about whether there’s indeed something special about ‘Red Strips on the aircraft tails‘.. 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 
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A neat picture of these two - ‘the Yakovlevs brothers’. Isn’t it cool to see such a clear illustration of ‘Perspective‘? On a 2-D pic planes project into images of the same size. A friend of mine who flies out of Domodedovo took this shot. 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 »
Another training session is coming up soon. In fact, - in the next week. Oh, time flies! Feel a bit stressed, as always. Uh, ‘flyable time’ - it is a different stance.
But as for simulators, and the history of the aviation ’simulated training’ - it is quite an educative topic. My first exposure to the ’simulated flight’ occurred at the Aqtyubinsk Flight College. Read the rest of this entry »
Radial engine is back to Canadian bush. Noteworthy that it is a Russian engine now. Well, generally speaking, radial engine hasn’t been written off yet completely as a choice of power plant for specifically bush aircraft. But it presumably means those choices were made many, many years ago, when that design for internal combustion engines was ‘in fashion’. Or, in favour among the ‘then’ engine manufacturers. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent dialog with a guy from England prompted me to look in to my archive (not really large one, don’t you think it is a ‘coffer of treasure ), and retrieve from there a few old photographs dated early 80s, when I attended and graduated a flight college in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.
Yak-42 was a remarkable plane made in the USSR. I remember the time when it appeared on the regular service, being operated by a few regional detachments of the former - the ‘Soviet Aeroflot’. To aviation community in the West, Aeroflot was (and, probably, some think it still is.. but it is not any more) known as the ‘largest airline’ in the world. In some sense it was true. Read the rest of this entry »
*HERE is a report from a previous visit to Springbank
Got a chance to see Butch and Yak today.
However, there’s another practical reason for a trip to Springbank - my medical was due, so I elected to go to the Doctor Adams’ clinic at Springbank.
Of course, it was a joke, but who knows.. Should check statistics.
Thanks to Alan Negrin (a remark about Glasair Aviation as ‘being a second largest aircraft manufacturer in the state of Washington’ was his ) we had a chance to tour the factory.
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