Categories: Residence and weekdays, Lev Shlyakhter

There appeared so called relay flights. Do you know what is passenger capacity of plane «ИЛ-14»?

No.

22 passengers and 3 persons of crew.

Is it like a huge crop-duster or not?

No, a crop-duster’s capacity is 10 persons, yes. Helicopters’ capacity is 8, 10 or more people. And that is for 22 people. Well, it flew from Magadan. I was on board when it made his first flight. I played football then, I played sports, walking with crutches (laughing). I went to get with the wife’s relatives, I can say so. So you took plane in Magadan, the nearest airport was 13 km away, now this port is closed, it is open only for helicopters. Now the nearest airport is 60 km away. It accommodates the plane ИЛ-62 – its capacity is 160 people. This plane landed every 2 or 3 hours to tank up. It had the route Magadan-Okhotsk-Kirensk- Chita. And he did its way to Moscow, to the airport Bykovo. In 36 hours of flight time. So, it landed, then took off, again landed and took off. Though, they gave us food on board. They fed us a little, gave some food. But that was ok. Could you imagine if we had to go without waiting? We had to buy tickets. It was difficult to get the tickets. It took a week or two to buy a ticket for the train, for example, from Vladivostok to Moscow. You had to wait a steamboat sometimes for a month, but sometimes for two weeks. And in general it took 10 days to make the way by train, and 5 days – by steamboat. And here it took 36 hours to get to Moscow. And when my wife and me were leaving for vacations, we started at 8 o’clock in the morning and there was a fair wind, at 7.30 by Moscow standard time. On the day when you are coming back from vacations you have 16 hours of flight, for 8 hours you fly without landing, so you fly for 8 hours and these 8 hours are real time hours.

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Researcher: Natalja Ivashchanka, Sviatlana Silava, Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno