Well, here are the soviet “rigid airframe airships” or blimps for short (even though blimps don’t really have a rigid airframe). Anyway, if you ignore these formalities, you can see that Soviets were actively developing and using their blimps…
The interesting story behind a blimp your looking at right now, was that on September 6th 1935, due to a strong wind gust this blimp was blown off the airbase even though it had 60 anchored cables tying it to the ground. Long story short, a captain of the ship (N.S. Gudovancev) that at the time was on the ground, was able to catch one of the supporting cables and climb on to the ship, when it was already 120 meters up in the air. In the cabin , there were 4 adults and 11 children. When the height was 800 meters, he was able to start the engines and 5 hours and 45 minutes he safely landed the blimp after the bad weather had passed. The captain who had saved the ship (as well as people) received an Order of Red Star.
We’ve just showed you Moscow from a helicopter, and you’ve already seen what Russian countryside looks from the sky, now here are more pictures for you, enjoy…
We’ve already introduced you to the aviation photography in Russia, here are some pictures from Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow…
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We already covered this this ex-military pilot in Russia who used to fly Tu-154, and recently became a captain on Boeing-737 flying for one low cost Russian air carrier, but instead of making you look for all 5 parts, we wanted to unite all of his incredible pictures into this one gallery. The guy’s name is Alexiy, but he calls himself “letchik leha” which would literally translate as “pilot alexiy”, he has been taking spectacular pictures from the cockpits of the airplanes for the past three years. Here are his pictures of the sky, ground, as well as airplanes - basically everything that he sees at his job daily. All of the pictures we are posting here are taken by him, and you can find more at his journal here…
Ilushin-86 remains the first Russian wide body passenger airliner. Making its maiden flight back in 1976, 42 out of 103 Il-86 produced, still remain flying today. Il-86 is a very safe aircraft, with only one crash with fatalities back in 2002. One thing that had been noted about Il-86 is their periodic long take off rolls. While most of the Il-86 take offs are pretty much uneventful, at some airports where the short runaways, high temperatures, humidity and heavy summer loads come into play, the take offs can appear quite dramatic (image 1, image 2, image 3)…
Pictures from the private archive of the pilot of the Su-25 which he flew in the Afghanistan during its war with Russia…
Ekranoplanes were invented by the Soviet Union engineer Rastislav Alexeev. They were created during Cold War, to serve as fast moving strategic “aircrafts” and were based on Caspian as well as Black Sea. These ekranoplanes could fly only meters off the ground, but had an advantage of flying fast under the radars (up to 550km/h on MD-160), carrying heavy loads as well as missiles. The “Caspian Sea Monster” also went into the history for being able to lift and fly 544 tons of dry weight, which is more weight than the biggest airplane in the world AN-225 can fly with…
“Lun” with 6 anti-ship missiles…
Even though this video is in Russian, it’s still worth watching since it shows you the rare archive videos of these birds in action…
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We’ve already told you about the new “Sukhoi Superjet 100 Regional Jet”. This plane had made it’s first flight in Komsomolks-na_Amure (eastern part of Russia) on May 19th, 2008. Who knows maybe these will be flying all over the world soon, just like the Brazilian Embraer-190, since the starting prices ($27 million) of these two birds are actually similar…
- here is how Superjet was created…
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Recently the news had surfaced that a Swiss pilot Yves Rossy a.k.a. “Fusion Man” had flown over the Alps using his jet powered wing. That’s all nice and everything, especially knowing that back in 1935 a Soviet engineer Mr. Sanfirov had himself designed and then tested his wing while parachuting out of an airplane, except that his wing didn’t cost $285,000 to build…
We’ve already shown you pictures of the 15th Anniversary of “Russian Knights” aviation display team. Here is the video of the “Russian Knights” showing one of their spectacular performances. Below we are also including the video of “VFTC Aerobatics Team” from Moscow who fly using Microsoft Flight Simulator…
P.S. The only sad part here is that the government pay so little money to those one of a kind aces whose job it is to the represent Russian Aviation on a world’s stage, that all of those pilots you’ve seen in the first video, would actually get paid more if they worked for the local Russian airlines…
We have already shown you pictures from a Moscow Aviation Museum at night, now here are pictures from the Aviation museum near Ulyanovsk, Russia. These pictures were taken and sent in to us by a tourist from the Netherlands who had visited the museum. The most notable aircraft on display in that museum, is obviously the Tupolev-144 Supersonic jet, the one that made its first flight 3 months before Concorde…
Plane Spotting, or Aviation photography has been around for decades. With huge online picture databases, and with more affordable photo gear, it definitely had been on the rise in the past 10 years. Of course Russia with its rich aviation history, also has a lot of aviation enthusiasts, who willingly stand next to airports for hours in attempt to get that perfect shot. Here are two videos about the hobby, first one in English, and second one with the English subtitles.
P.S. Personally I’ve been into aviation my whole life, so as soon as i got the “right camera”, the transition to aviation photography was a very natural process. Even though I’m still an amateur, i still want to share some of my pictures with you. All of these were shot at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City. I put these up here as an experiment, if you guys/gals like them I’ll be uploading more pictures from my future trips. Your comments are welcome…
One guy flew from Almati to Kiev on one Ukrainian carrier, had decided to bring a camera with inside a plane. What he found inside was a plane held together by duck tape…
Here are very interesting pictures taken from the ultralight trike by a guy who flew in it as a passanger. In Russia one flight costs around 30$, and interestingly enough they land and take off right from the public road!!!
