*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.
Well, it may seem to sound like a joke.
However, it is just ‘half-a-joke’ 
I doubt if Oleg Deripaska reads ‘Globe and Mail’ at all.. Although, it might be that his assistants had prepared some excerpts from Canadian media reporting on an interview he gave them in Moscow a few days ago. (Oh, sure, free media in the West write all kind of stuff on ‘oligarchic capitalism in Russia’ generally, and Oleg Deripaska - particularly
But it is an utterly obscure probability that this post will get ‘on his radar’ any time soon. Anyway, if this thing is going to ever happen, I’d like to invite him to be an honored member of our ‘RA-85123 Fan Club‘.
And there’s something that makes me think this invitation is ‘no-nonsense’.
My friend Max, an Aeroflot 767 pilot, and his wife Lilya came to visit us for a few days.
We spent the whole Monday exploring Canadian hallmarks located in Banff National park, such as Lake Louise, Peyto Lake. It seems our guests enjoyed the tour. They said ‘the look of everything they saw was very refreshing’. I bet it should be, - nothing common with Moscow ‘urban landscape’ 
Rockies welcomed them with a beautiful day too. We are planning a tour in the Calary downtown for tomorrow.
Will Max want to see WestJet?.. Hmm, should ask him
I guess, they are bound to have such a meeting one day. It is amazing, how smaller and smaller this world is becoming!
And now I’m going to to pass a ‘Hello’ from a Mars pilot to Beriev pilots.
The only problem is all active Beriev pilots now out of their bases, posted to somewhere else (around Europe), pretty busy fighting fires, including those ones ravaging in Greece.
Hello, my dear ‘RA-85123 Fan Club’ members,
It is a pleasure for me to inform you that we’ve just got a new image from Russia showing our ‘idol plane’ RA-85123.
It was spotted at Adler, - an airport servicing the Black Sea resort of Sochi - the would-be host town for the Winter Olympics-2014, by the way. And it was a job by Denis, a sure candidate for our club. Denis flies 737 for the second largest Russian carrier S7. He too flew Tu-154 before switching to Boeing. Read the rest of this entry »
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
So, Happy Birthday, Annie!
Venerable biplane is going to meet its 60th anniversary. As a matter of fact, on 31st of August. Interesting, if Mr. Robert S. Grant who wrote an article on ‘Annie’ in the ‘Canadian Aviator’ magazine knows about it.. Anyway, I’ll try to find a way how to remind him of this fact
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
(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.
… Sounds like the ‘heredity really matters’.
She came to visit us from the ‘Cossacks’ Country’ - a region of Russia traditionally called ‘Kuban’ (nothing has to do with ‘Cuba’, though, and I was reflecting on it here), with a main city of Krasnodar. In old times it was called ‘Ekaterinodar’, which meant a ‘big gift’ to the cossacks from Katherine the Great, a legendary Russian Empress .
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