*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’
(that’s how one of the Bill Shepherd’s friends worded it when we 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, which I was watching as if it suddenly materialized from my childhood dreams, and had appeared quite 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, but in fact it could be quite suitable for an ‘airline alliance’ name.. And the proposed alliance’s partners would probably find this image to be suitable as a letterhead graphic on the first page of their interline agreement, if ever such an agreement to 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 worked on at the time, maintaining and preparing it for flying.
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 learned about Butch Foster, his friend Ron and their homebuilt project from a flight examiner who I flew a Transport Canada Instrument Rating test with.
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..
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