Paul, a guy from England, who I recently talked to with regard to flying Yak-42 asked a question:
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 »
At last I loaded up a video which I took in last November during a visit to the Springbank airport. Butch Foster demonstrated then a start and the run of engine on their Yak-1. I remember I hardly reached a spot in the hangar where he worked, as he asked me: “Wanna hear some noise?” 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.
Yes, we ‘tracked them down’
(as Bill Shepherd’s friend worded it out when he met in a hangar), and here we are, in a small community of aviation enthusiasts at Diamond Point Air Park, WA.
I first saw the plane at Oshkosh
and since then I wanted to know more about it, and it’s owner.
I would like to thank Bill for almost two hours he spent with us telling interesting stuff about the plane, that now sort of materialized from my child dreams, and appeared real, in metal and fabric, with Red Stars painted on fuselage and the wings.
See more on this in one of the future reports.
(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.
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.
‘Kuban&Cubana’, - never heard of?
Tell you, nothing in common with Dolce&Gabbana’ 
Yeah, sounds funny, and in fact it would better be suitable for an ‘airline alliance’ name.. Or, they’ll rather use this ‘logo’ as a letterhead graphic on the first page of their interline agreement, if ever such an agreement would be forged between the two
Here is my friend Alexei, and we took this picture in Krasnodar, in late 90s. He stands by the Yak-18T which he maintained and prepared for flying.
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