Some time in the early 90s a guy I know was young, doing fabric work on Yak 52s to get them ready for US sale, and doing it alongside a Russian immigrant whose English wasn’t yet perfect. He offered the Russian guy a ride in his very average Luscombe, thinking that was the decent thing to do. Before working with this fellow he had never heard the name Sergei Boriak.
True story… the punch line is going vertically upward at under 1000 ft AGL with 65 HP pulling them along, my friend still young enough to be fearless and slowly figuring out what was going on.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
And finally, they are a money generator for Antonov and the companies who operate them to a degree that nobody involved takes any cavalier attitude. Too much hangs on them.
I realized this few years ago when AN-225 transported a transformer produced in factory in Zagreb to power plant in Philippines. However the cost was big, it dwarfed a cost of having power plant out of function and waiting delivery by cargo ship.
BeechBaby wrote:
Apparently they had an issue and hand flew the leg at 10k, VFR, at night. Wow…
There is one bit about pressurisation on those planes which are to be remembered. Only the upper floor, the crew compartment in front and aft of the wing are pressurized. The whole cargo floor is not. That goes for all of those planes, the AN22, 125 and 225.
What you describe sounds very much like they either had a pressurisation problem or they had a cargo which needed the lower altitude. I was told once by a AN124 crew that there were parts for rocket industry which had to be flown at maximum 15000 ft, so they needed a lot more fuel to fly those but fly them they did.
BeechBaby wrote:
I do remember the documentary which followed a Russian airline crew, flying 154’s I think. The programme had them swigging shots of Vodka in the Met office pre flight, shoot to a guy refuelling it with a lit fag in his mouth, which naturally brought hilarity, and scorn in equal measures. That was in the past
There is a huge difference between those elite guys from Antonov whom they trust to fly their valuable transporters (remember there is only a few of them) and those TU 134/154 or IL76 jockeys who were notorious in the time. Mind, the TU154 is a very safe and robust airplane. It has about the same load as a 727 but weighs considerably more. I’ve had the good fortune spending a month on a (non russian operated) TU154M and have grown to love this airplane. Unfortunately the engines are way too thirsty (they are of a generation approximately compatible with the MD80 kind of engines) so I understand the TU is now out of service almost everywhere. The IL76 btw runs a similar engine and is still very much in service. Again there are very serious and very hazardous operators. One story which goes around is from a cargo flight which was refused by all operators into some desert strip in Afghanistan. Finally they found a IL76 operator who said they’d do it for (insert your own insane amount of money) which the Americans accepted. They went there, landed the IL76 and were immediately picked up by some biz jet who had flown along. When asked when they would pick up the IL76, they shrugged and said, “we are not going to take it back, it’s your’s now”. It soon came out that it was a plane which was out of cycles and so they decided to use it for this one last flight.
Again, there are horror stories galore about such outfits, also Antonovs in Africa (mostly AN12 but also AN24 and 26’s) flying where no sane person would fly. But this has nothing whasoever to do with the ops we are talking about here. In Africa, also western airliners are used under conditions which would give our European safety guys collective heart attacks. Can do, sure, but don’t ask how.
