Flying the Formerly Soviet Skies

(Or, Transatlantic the Old-Fashioned Way: With Two Fuel Stops)

I rarely have the opportunity to fly, so to this day my boyhood sense of adventure emerges whenever the chance arises. Window seat? Yes, please! Safety? The trip to the airport in my car was statistically more dangerous. And there’s nothing like viewing the light show of a thunderstorm in Mexico from 200 miles away and 32,000 feet up. Just in case that doesn’t happen, I bring a book.

[To my friends whose jobs require them to fly so often that the process has become a chore, I say: you have my sympathies, and I hope to stay aviationally unjaded for a long time. To my friends who dread flying at all due to phobia, I say: again, my sympathies, and I’m glad to have been spared your affliction. To my former students, I say: yes, a book.]

Compounding my joy at finally visiting another continent, I was pleased to learn that the travel to and from Mother Russia would be aboard Aeroflot.

Aeroflot (“Air Fleet”) is a major Russia-based airline, founded in 1923. For historical perspective, that was the year before Lenin died and subsequently kicked off his still-running one man show in Red Square. During Soviet times, Aeroflot was technically the largest airline in the world, at least on paper; it comprised literally every nonmilitary aircraft in the USSR, down to the last crop duster. The airline’s reputation in the West, even dismissing the obvious Cold War propaganda, was not sparkling. Stories were told of passengers boarding domestic flights along with their livestock, of pilots who asked the ground crew for directions to the airstrip by shouting out a window, of brake failure in the landing gear because the fluid had been drained by workers seeking a free drink.

The airline had no flights to American airports at all until about 1992. Remember Samantha Smith? At age 10, she wrote a letter to CPSU General Secretary Yuri Andropov expressing her concern about nuclear war. He responded by inviting her to visit him at the Kremlin. In order to do so she had to travel to Montreal in order to board an Aeroflot plane.

By Summer 1994, when I would board a flight from New York’s JFK to Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Aeroflot was still using Soviet-built aircraft. Here is my photo of the Ilyushin Il-86 that would wing me to the other side of the world:

I remember thinking at the time that the plane must have been painted in transitional livery: it flew the recently adopted Russian flag on its tail, but also bore the winged hammer-and-sickle emblem of its Soviet roots. For whatever reason, the emblem remains in use to this day, as shown in the photo at top, taken from the airline’s website.

(OK, so it’s not as startling a sight as it would be if, say, the Lufthansa planes sported the Hakenkreuz. But I know at least a dozen people who would sooner swim to Europe than travel there in a plane stamped with “that Commie insignia.”)

If the aircraft appears huge on the outside, the interior struck me as cavernous. This was my first trip on a wide-body plane, and not only were there two spacious aisles, but also plenty of headroom, especially in the center section, which had no overhead storage. I’m sure that last fact has made some of you automatically nix this plane from your travel plans. Not to worry: the Il-86 is no longer in civilian service, having been banned from most world airports in 2003 for violating noise restrictions.

As large as it was, the Il-86 was classified only as medium-range, which meant that it lacked the capacity for flying nonstop to Moscow. We touched down twice for refueling along the way: in Gander, Newfoundland, and in Shannon, Ireland. The plane also restocked its food supplies at each respite, and I have to say that the breakfast from Ireland was the finest meal I have ever enjoyed aboard an aircraft.

To my disappointment, I found that the entire trans-oceanic leg of the trip was above cloud cover, so there was no blue Atlantic for me to gaze upon from above. But I was delighted as we approached to land in Shannon: the Irish countryside really did appear a rich green, much like the patches of moss I would dig out of sidewalks as a boy. (Yes, that was a quaint small-town occupation, but it kept me off the streets.)

After setting down at Sheremetyevo, I distinctly remember that as we emerged from the passenger bridge into the concourse, the first item I walked past on Russian soil was…a floor ashcan, bearing an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes. Yeah, the Soviets put in a rough three-quarters of a century, but Western culture had prevailed in the end.

Scarcely a month later, I was back at Sheremetyevo to return to the land of my birth (and non-centralized water heaters–more about that in a later essay). The chariot of the day was an Il-96, newer and larger than its predecessor. A long-range vehicle, it would carry its travelers directly to The Big Apple from The Big Cabbage. (Nobody calls it that.) I had my books, my pocket Scrabble game, and people I knew on board to play it with. The ten-hour flight proceeded without incident.

Almost. About an hour before landing at JFK, the plane encountered turbulence on a major scale. I’ve never been a white-knuckle flier, but it was uncomfortable shaking, and lasted several minutes. The Russian passengers on board seemed strangely unperturbed, but no doubt some of the Americans were looking out the windows to make sure all the engines were intact. There were retching sounds coming from several sections of the cabin. Suddenly, a little Kazakh boy seated next to me shouted to his mother a couple rows back: Мама, меня тошнит! (“Mama, I feel sick!”) Following an instinct that could have been paternal or just self-serving, I quickly reached down, emptied my camera equipment from its plastic grocery bag, and held it in front of the lad just in time. A moment later, the boy thanked me, as did his mother. I was a hero to my adjacent passengers and our clothes. It was only then that the flight attendants began handing out barf bags.

A former classmate of mine sitting across the aisle said, “Guy, you just got my vote for Father of the Year.”

Aeroflot. Once you’ve traveled with them, you’ll never fly another airline like it again. If you can help it.

•Дополнении•

• Not an Aeroflot story, but one I must share about the travel from Tucson to New York. I flew via America West Airlines to Las Vegas, where I then took a connecting red-eye to JFK. My seat on that plane was toward the back. There must have been congestion on the airstrip (at midnight?), because we sat on the plane without leaving the gate for at least a quarter-hour. I became aware of a conversation from the passengers directly behind me. These were people who were returning home (I quickly surmised), and were discussing the relative merits of New York versus Las Vegas. Specifically, the bagels available in The Entertainment Capital compared miserably with those readily purchased back home. The woman in the group offered her scientific explanation for New York’s clear advantage. “It’s the water!” she declared. (Read this in the urban accent of your choice.) “The sulfide content of the water!” Her companions clearly agreed, though the conversation stayed on that subject almost until we left the ground.

I glanced at the woman who was seated next to me, and saw that she was somewhat red-faced, trying to maintain composure. She looked at me, and very quietly said, “I wonder if I should tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“I own a chain of bagel restaurants here in Vegas.”

I shook my head. “Just leave it alone. Or else we could be hearing about it all through the flight.”

She nodded. The Bagel Battle would not take place tonight, in a sealed metal craft high above the Great Plains.

Epilogue: upon returning five weeks later to New York, I visited for a few days with my sister and her husband in Manhattan. I related that story to them one evening over dinner. My brother-in-law nodded. “Guy, I think you’ve just met our Brain Trust.”

• On the flight from New York to Gander, I was seated next to a young woman named Yulya. She had been an exchange student for the last year in Minnesota, and was now returning home to Belarus. She really didn’t want to leave.

• For our stops in Gander and Shannon, we had the unusual (for me) experience of deplaning through a center door that took us through the cargo hold of the plane. That’s a weird design, I thought. Much later I discovered that this was a feature of the aircraft, which enabled the система «багаж с собой» or “luggage-at-hand system.” The idea was that passengers would buy their tickets at the airport, and then board the plane, depositing their luggage in the hold on the way to their seats. For some reason, that arrangement was never implemented at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

• On the ten-hour flight from Moscow to New York, word went around the cabin that a celebrity was on board. It was none other than Ukrainian-born actor Boris Sichkin. No, I had never heard of him. Yes, I got his autograph.

• Among many other things, this journey sparked in me a lifelong affinity for…Ireland. Yes, a two-hour layover in an airport concourse is barely a sniff, let alone a taste of a country; but all the same, I was smitten. Maybe it was seeing the puffy white dots of sheep on the green pastures near the runway. Maybe it was hearing a heavenly woman’s voice over the public address inside, purring the words, “Would Mr. Murphy, recently arrived from New York, please come to the duty-free?” Definitely the latter; I was the sleep-deprived American in the corner, melting to the music of an angel’s brogue. Oh, yeah.

I haven’t yet been back to the Emerald Isle, but I occasionally tune into Clare FM for a fix of Celtic ear candy. It puts a sparkle in my already-green eyes.