Splendid. Another ‘great accomplishment was tucked under the belt’ today after we payed a visit to Everett, WA, where the wide body Boeing planes are being produced on the huge factory adjacent to the aerodrome called ‘Paine Field’.
Hello, everybody,
It is a notice to all ‘RA-85123 Fan Club’ members that we’ve got a new fellow into our enthusiastic group.
Let me introduce ‘Tom the Dutchman’ to you
I know Tom, we’ve been in touch for a pretty long while, talking on a number of aviation topics, - TU-154 aircraft included. In fact, Tom even dared to consider an idea of going over to Russia, and looking for a flying job there!
(Click HERE, if you wanna see the ‘beginning of the series’)
Like those trips to Springbank..
There are some reasons for that. It is an enjoyable ride, first of all. Going West via Old Springbank Road gets you soon into the open, and you can see a lot of space on foothills, and Rockies on the horizon - my favorite look as you roll down the Hill.
In all previous posts I’ve never been too close to the ’shadowy’ areas of politics. But reading an article in the recent ‘Canadian Aviator’ made me think: “Hey, it’s gonna be fun, lets talk about it!’
An author, Robert S. Grant, had one in the ‘Tales from the Lakeview’ section of the magazine. It was on the Antonov-2, a venerable ‘bush-biplane’ created in the Soviet Union in the late 40s.
You maybe noticed, I organized a whole blog category under the same name. Because the Mr. Yakovlev’s name is a very special one. It always meant a lot for the generations of aviators in Russia (or, formerly - in the Soviet Union). They usually learned this name at the very beginning of their way ‘from the ground up’.
Oh, yes, - for myself, as a potential ‘leisure floatplane flier’, a torturous period of ‘daydreaming and seeing myself soaring over the beautiful back country’ began! But a good ‘kick on the head to awaken the lost’ for ‘reality check’ surely wouldn’t harm.
‘Just look into your logbook!’, one may scream, and this one would be right. Thousands hours of multi-engine jet time, and the only experience I had on a single-engine piston powered plane was a time when I flew the Yak-18T in the Aqtobe Civil Aviation Flight College ’some twenty and plus’ years ago.
When I watched that hilarious video of the ‘Dancing Cadet’ on You-Tube, I thought of our years in the Flight Training College.
One e-mail I received recently surprised me a lot.
It was a feedback from an old, now a totally obsolete project, our ‘Home Base’, - an experimental web-site me and my son set up in the late 90s, when we yet lived in Krasnodar, Russia.
A gentleman who sent this e-mail was from Australia, and he was talking with regard to the Yak-18T, - he found a Google reference to a page in that project of mine where there was some material about the plane.
I found this image in one of my albums, and it should be dated back to 1999, as I remember. I took it in Krasnodar, Russia, - and this Yakovlev-18T was not a common view there, and
then, - even on the ‘back-side ramps’ of the airports - you know, sometimes you can hit into something really interesting at these quiet spots..
‘Back in the USSR!’
Not on the BOAC plane, but on our ‘Time Machine’:)
Here’s a couple of words about FLIGHT TRAINING IN THE USSR.
An aviation training system in the USSR was remarkably different from what existed for the same purposes in the Western countries. In the middle of 70s the Ministry of Civil aviation in the USSR began introducing a new type of training facilities that could be defined as ‘ab-initio colleges’.
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