With Aerosvit.
First leg on a B737-400, nothing special except 2h delay.
The more intersting part was the second leg from Kiev to Odessa, late in the evening.
A Yak-42D. With a 3-3 seat configuration.
What a junkyard! Greasy, dirty, hot, smelly.
Seat distance 10 centimeters (I'm not kidding, I'm 6ft3in and I just couldn't sit there). Talking about seats. Like cast-iron sun chairs. Including shin-breaker metal rods. And the backrests of these seats just like a sun chair - foldable! The plane was almost full, but some seats were free, and people folded the backrests in front of them and used them as footstools.
And talking about onboard security. In the West we have those nice reinforced cockpit doors with electronic access control and all that stuff. In that Yak there was just - a curtain! Ok, nobody could hijack that plane anyway, simply cause he couldn't get out of his seat, or bump his head on the very low bins.
The aircraft itself is not so bad, kind of. Large, but few, round windows. Short take-off and landing-run. Dog-whistle engines in idle, at cruise they are rumbling low and show some acoustical oscilation, but that is probably because the were not fully at identical rpms. Quite slow and I think very stable approach. In cruise distinct roll-yaw oscillations, three to four cycles after each maneuver.
Back from Odessa to Moscow nothing special.
Vnukovo airport pretty new but rather strangely (better stupidly) designed.
Slippery marbel on the floors, corridors too narrow, and you arrive on the second floor which means rather narrow stairs (although there is a small elevator). At least the girls at immigration look better than those at SVO.
Loads of Tu-154 on the tarmac.
Plus the road leading to/from the airport is single lane, like a tripple-digit highway. An autobahn is in the making.
Posts: 4,674
By: Distiller - 4th October 2006 at 07:31
With Aerosvit.
First leg on a B737-400, nothing special except 2h delay.
The more intersting part was the second leg from Kiev to Odessa, late in the evening.
A Yak-42D. With a 3-3 seat configuration.
What a junkyard! Greasy, dirty, hot, smelly.
Seat distance 10 centimeters (I'm not kidding, I'm 6ft3in and I just couldn't sit there). Talking about seats. Like cast-iron sun chairs. Including shin-breaker metal rods. And the backrests of these seats just like a sun chair - foldable! The plane was almost full, but some seats were free, and people folded the backrests in front of them and used them as footstools.
And talking about onboard security. In the West we have those nice reinforced cockpit doors with electronic access control and all that stuff. In that Yak there was just - a curtain! Ok, nobody could hijack that plane anyway, simply cause he couldn't get out of his seat, or bump his head on the very low bins.
The aircraft itself is not so bad, kind of. Large, but few, round windows. Short take-off and landing-run. Dog-whistle engines in idle, at cruise they are rumbling low and show some acoustical oscilation, but that is probably because the were not fully at identical rpms. Quite slow and I think very stable approach. In cruise distinct roll-yaw oscillations, three to four cycles after each maneuver.
Back from Odessa to Moscow nothing special.
Vnukovo airport pretty new but rather strangely (better stupidly) designed.
Slippery marbel on the floors, corridors too narrow, and you arrive on the second floor which means rather narrow stairs (although there is a small elevator). At least the girls at immigration look better than those at SVO.
Loads of Tu-154 on the tarmac.
Plus the road leading to/from the airport is single lane, like a tripple-digit highway. An autobahn is in the making.