height limit. His feet were huge, and with his eagle’s-beak nose we told him he had a natural “pilot’s profile.” Karpich came from the city of Armavir and tantalized us with tales of all the good-looking lonely nurses across the town at their school. His father had a wonderful collection of Western rock music records and we later had some great parties at his family’s apartment.
By the end of our second semester, we were deeply involved in preflight training, studying the systems of the L-29 jet trainer. My class was flown to the preliminary flight-training center at Pirsagat in Azerbaijan in August 1979. The base was on an arid stretch of Caspian Sea coast south of Baku. I was not prepared for the baking heat of the Azerbaijan summer. We slept in old wooden barracks with no mosquito nets, and a few slow ceiling fans moved the stifling air. The soldiers showed us the trick of sleeping under wet sheets so that the evaporation cooled us.
Like most of the cadets, I had just turned eighteen. We knew, of course, that the L-29 was only a jet trainer, not a combat fighter, but standing next to the gleaming three-ton aircraft and sliding my hands along the hot alloy skin of the thirty-two-foot wingspan, it seemed incredible that the State would give me the responsibility of flying such a complex and powerful machine.
Dmitri, the keen observer of the West, told us that student pilots in the American Air Force and Navy received their basic flight instruction on propeller planes, and didn’t progress to jets for many months. When you considered that our American counterparts didn’t even begin to fly until they had completed their university or service academy education, this meant they were almost twenty-three years old before they soloed in a jet. By that age, most of us would be line pilots in combat regiments with hundreds of operational sorties under our belts.
But first we had to learn to fly.
The L-29 was built by Aero Vodochody in Czechoslovakia, and was the standard basic advanced training aircraft of the Warsaw Pact. Over three thousand had been produced. The tandem twin cockpits, each with a complete set of flight controls, sat well forward of the straight wings.
At Pirsagat I was fortunate once again in the instructor I was assigned. Senior Lieutenant Anatoli Tveretin was demanding and meticulous, but personally relaxed in his approach to flight training. Tveretin, who seemed a young man of almost miraculous patience, never lost his composure. I was lucky because Karpich and I were the only cadets on the lieutenant’s training crew that term. But he did expect us to study hard and not repeat the same mistakes.
Lieutenant Tveretin reiterated that flying was primarily a physical, not an abstract, exercise. “Zuyev,” he told me that first day I strapped into the front cockpit, “get a good feel of that ejection seat. Pilots have to feel their airplane with their butts.”
The Americans, he said, had supposedly once conducted an experiment in which they had injected pilots in the ass with novocaine, and none of them could properly land his plane. “The point,” he added, “is that you control the aircraft. The aircraft does not control you.”
Waiting to take off on my familiarization ride around the training circuits, Lieutenant Tveretin urged me to pay close attention. “If you don’t understand something,” he said, “ask me.”
He started the engine and we closed and latched our canopies. I was immediately struck by the smell, which I later recognized as the distinctive odor of Soviet military cockpits, a combination of hot electronics, stale sweat, and rubber. It had a sour quality that almost made me gag. Before me, the instrument panel suddenly seemed completely unfamiliar, even though I’d learned the systems perfectly in the classroom. Tveretin released the brake and advanced the throttle. We were trundling along the taxi ramp toward the end of the runway. Now we had swung out and were square on the centerline, facing the broad concrete runway rippling with heat mirage. I hated to admit how nervous I was. In the closed cockpit, with the sun pouring in, the cloying sour smell grew stronger. Luckily our Samarskiye mentors had told us to carry plastic bags in our flight suits in case we got sick on our first training flights. A cadet would be immediately grounded if an instructor reported he had actually vomited in the cockpit. “If you’re going to puke,” our friends warned us, “do it in the bag, then hide the bag.” That same harsh rule, I learned, applied to all Soviet military pilots. This first flight in a jet was not starting well. And then, as if telepathic, Tveretin reassured me. “Fear is normal,” he said calmly. “Don’t be surprised to be afraid. The fear will go away with experience.”
On this first sortie I was to rest my feet lightly on the rudder pedals and my hand loosely on the control stick to get the feel of the controls. Now Tveretin opened the throttle to full military power and released the brakes. We slid slowly down the runway. The acceleration increased, but we were still rooted to the ground. Only after a ponderously long, deliberate takeoff run did Tveretin gently rotate the nose and we climbed. The gear came thumping up and the flat brown horizon slid away. I felt the stick in my right hand. The airplane was alive.
Tveretin put the plane through a series of steep quarter-rolls as we climbed around the airfield approach circuit. He was doing me a favor, pointing out the various landmarks below that I would later need to recognize when I flew solo. But tilted way over on the right wing, staring straight down through my canopy as we sailed above the Azerbaijan desert, was not soothing to my stomach. The hot rubbery smell of the cockpit grew worse. I slipped the folded plastic bag from my flight-suit pocket.
Then, while Tveretin had me hold the controls on the landing approach, I knew I was going to vomit. If I didn’t hide it from the lieutenant, my career as a military pilot was going to end prematurely. “Please take over, Comrade Lieutenant,” I managed, sliding the open bag to my face.
“What’s the problem?”
“My kneeboard slipped,” I said into the intercom microphone. Then I vomited up my breakfast.
Tveretin was too busy flying from the rear cockpit to notice. I knotted the bag and stuck it in my pocket.
After getting sick three more times — always unnoticed by Tveretin — I learned to skip breakfast and lunch on flying days. Eventually my stomach settled down. Although Tveretin never acknowledged my airsickness, he did explain the Coriolis effect that provoked dizzy nausea when you moved your head too fast during banks and turns. From then on, I moved my head very slowly, especially when we were steeply banked.
As we trained through that stifling Azerbaijan summer, the Stavka high command in Moscow suddenly announced that the Armavir PVO Academy was being transferred to the Air Force, the VVS. This abrupt transformation, we were told, was part of a general reorganization and modernization of the entire Soviet military ordered by Deputy Defense Minister Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov. The Air Force would be expanded with additional regiments of advanced fighter aircraft, while the bloated and inefficient PVO would be trimmed down to a proper size.
I had not understood the difference between the two services as a schoolboy in Samara. But a year at the academy had taught me that the PVO Air Defense Force provided much more comfortable duty than the VVS. Despite the dire warnings about the guardhouse, Armavir was a quiet sanctuary from overly strict military discipline. On the other hand, the VVS had a reputation for rigid adherence to regulations and snap inspections by incorruptible teams from the Ministry of Defense. In the PVO command, inspections were usually scheduled months in advance.
The PVO had evolved during the Great Patriotic War from antiaircraft artillery units and had less of the traditional elan than the VVS, which had descended from the colorful Hussar cavalry regiments. Senior PVO officers had a reputation of being stolid dolts, oxen not thoroughbred horses. One of the forbidden stories at Armavir concerned an account of several PVO generals being flown by helicopter on an inspection tour. When they kept the helicopter crew waiting at one base several hours while the generals enjoyed a long lunch, the pilot got revenge by claiming his engine wouldn’t start because the battery had run down.
“Comrade Generals,” he said, “you’ll have to get out and push.”
The credulous generals climbed down, took off their bemedaled uniform blouses, and pushed the gawky Mi-8 along the runway until the pilot decided to hit his start button. Later, one general wrote a report condemning the poor design of the helicopter.
But we soon discovered that Air Force generals had both similarities and differences. A delegation of senior VVS officers descended on Pirsagat to look over their new charges. One tough, clearly arrogant colonel general named Gorelov, who wore the wings of a Sniper pilot, inspected our barracks. He seemed aghast that the floors and furniture were painted in pleasant shades of blue and green.
“In the Air Force,” General Gorelov bellowed, hardly controlling his outrage, “we do not have painted furniture. Scrape it all to bare wood.”
