Mother Russia

After 25 minutes of coercing, I've finally wrestled the Beech to FL240. She wasn't very fond of this climbing malarkey all the way since FL210. Not really a surprize, considering that she had to drag 13 pax and 4.000 lbs of fuel up there - we were as close to MTOW as you can get without (virtual) authorities kicking your head in.

Progress yesterday was excellent, despite fighting a nasty head wind all day. Never even once did we reach the planned cruising speed of 240, more like 228 was all she could muster with the wind firmly on the nose.
The first run was from Markovo (UHMO) to Magadan (UHMM), where I was at the right place at the right time to witness one of only 3 weekly departures of Domodedovo Airlines' IL-62 to Moscow - what a majestic bird, but that'll soon make way for yet another 767 probably. Leaving Magadan, I pointed her nose towards Yakutsk (UEEE) and off we went. Not wasting much time, I had her refuelled while refuelling myself with a bowl of Pasta, the size of which probably exceeds what my doc would advise.
Leaving Yakutsk behind, we made a run for the diamond mining town of Mirny (UERR). Another refuelling stop later we were off on the final leg of the day to Bratsk (UIBB), another completely meaningless town in the middle of nowhere. Almost 2.500 nm on a single day, not a bad progress.

Well, if that all sounds completely and mindnumbingly boring to you, welcome to the club. What a drag that was. Especially since all the airfields were the same. An asphalt runway of minimum 11.000ft with no visual aids whatsoever. But at least I finally have some gutfeeling for approaching runways without any gadget to help you with the glideslope. I'm normally completely useless at that, but by the time I gently settled her down in Bratsk, I sort of got the hang of it, which means I came in less than 500 ft too high.
This method of small airports having huge runways is not a result of russian lunacy, but more to the fact that these far eastern routes in the 70's were often served by TU-114's and those needed a whole lot of runway. And besides that Airports like Yakutsk, Bratsk and Mirny are dedicated ETOPS diversion airfields for the cross-polar routes, so they must easily handle an A33o or B777, which need some runway as well.

As I type, I've just been handed over to Krasnoyarsk Control and we're about 2.5 hours away from our destination, which is Novosibirsk's Tolmachevo Airport (UNNT). This is special for two reasons. Once there, we're only about 800nm from russias european part, so we're getting closer to home and the next flight will be to Omsk, my homebase when I was living in russia, so that'll be an airfield that I flew in and out from as a pax many a time. I will document that in pictures as well, because Tolmachevo is one of the best freeware sceneries for FS2004. Those russians are spectacular scenery designers.

With Omsk, Ekaterinburg,Kazan,Bryansk,Moscow,Kaliningrad,Sczeczin and finally Emden, we're just 8 flights and the rest of this away from home, so if everything works out, I'll have done my first trip around the world by Sunday :-)

cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1