See this picture
I took it on today’s afternoon from a spot inside the Concourse D by the Gate 33, as we were anxiously waiting for a Horizon Air Flight 2233 final call.
Soon it became obvious there’s no chance to get on this flight as the ’stand-by travelers’, - it was totally packed, so we left the air side, listed ourselves for an early morning flight, and went back home.
Attempt #1 failed.
Oshkosh is a great place to watch the different kind of flight performances - it is actually a ’show of shows’ where you can see a variety of ‘excerpts’ from many theme-specialized events (like this one: ‘Dave Dacy Airshows’). Of course, there’s been a lot of aerobatic flying performed there, by an array of teams and individual sporty’s pilots.
And it was a sort of natural thing that our attention was attracted to Sergei Boriak, a world-class aerobatic pilot, - ‘born in the USSR’, as myself (he lived in my native Kazakhstan too!), - and my name-sake, to all this 
Darn! - just unable be ‘too serious’: when I was writing previous post on the topic of ‘Boeing in Russia’ it happened to me again: at some point I ‘had given in’ and deviated from a ’serious tone’, and, instead of giving some ‘facts and figures’ to the audience of visitors that probably wanted to see them in order to find out if there’s any proof of an ‘allegedly growing Boeing’s presence in Russia’, I began to talk about planes’ names, and making fun of ‘Boeing the Pushkin’… Well, isn’t it a good proof ?
But today I recalled one recent episode, and it came to me I should share it ‘to top up’ the topic. It is about another plane bearing a really funny name
‘Hey! Look at that!’, I exclaimed in a surprise when we noticed this aircraft at Oshkosh Seaplane Base. A few days ago we saw it having just come from Yellowknife, NWT, to Red Lake, Ontario.
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’.
Yes, indeed, ‘wingwalking’ is an old stunt that goes back to the ‘era of ‘barnstorming’, - a period of post-WWI time when a ’surplus’ of retired from the war aviators appeared across the country, and being unable to find a more practical use for their skills and aeroplanes, they tried to make a buck performing for public with a variety of air stunts. Read the rest of this entry »
We saw Beech-18 on floats in four places during our trip to Red Lake-Oshkosh.
Of course, an encounter with the first one was very exciting. We met it in Red Lake, and it belonged to Chimo Air, a local charter company. I took a nice opportunity to walk ‘half-around’ this antique bird, C-FHZA, - sure, that’s the way - you can only do half around it, - unless you have a boat, or just jump into the water to finish full ‘half-walk-half-swim around’ the docked floatplane
This trip across two countries was also a revelation of how many ‘antique planes on floats’ are still in commercial service doing charters across Ontario and Minnesota hauling loads of fishermen and their gear to the remote lodges across the vast ‘Water World’ in the Lake of the Woods area. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
I should tell you, we were still under influence of the Norseman Festival in Red Lake - this probably explains a great deal of ’sensitivity’ that would inevitably
make us deviate from the route we were going to whatever spot any airplane looking capable to take off from the water was parked at.
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