Once Tveretin was satisfied I had mastered the feel of basic flight maneuvers, he nipped any overconfidence I might have exhibited by setting out a more difficult challenge: precision flying.
“You can even teach a bear to fly,” he said. “It’s really not hard to fly dirty. But a good fighter pilot flies clean.”
By “clean” he meant flying the aircraft with absolute control and certainty, so that you could consistently arrive at any given point in the sky with a minimum correction. Tveretin’s approach to instruction combined multiple repetitions of basic skills like flying landing approaches with more challenging maneuvers.
All the cadets were required to keep a personal logbook to record their training sorties. But I had a separate, private logbook in which I carefully noted every phase of my training with brutal honesty. “Cannot manage power for climbing right. Lost 120 feet of altitude on 60-degree turn,” I wrote. Two days later I noted, “Poor elevator trim on left-hand descent to final approach.” The next week I logged, “Huy ovo, all fucked up,” after a sloppy landing flare.
In early October, six weeks into our flight training, I was expected to be the first in my crew to solo. But Siskin, my skinny friend from Uralsk, was doing just as well with his instructor. We had each flown over thirty training sorties and could now accomplish the basic curriculum maneuvers required for solo flight. Lieutenant Tveretin, however, was not completely satisfied with my performance, although he assured me I wasn’t a “giraffe,” a student pilot with impossibly slow reactions, as if his hands and feet were too far from his eyes and brain. That was a compliment, coming from him.
On October 5, 1979, Siskin became the first in our class to solo after thirty-six sorties. Tveretin and I stood on the parking apron, watching Siskin complete his mandatory triple krug oval racetrack maneuver and descend onto final approach for landing.
“He’s a little short,” I commented.
Tveretin smiled. “So were you this morning.”
As always, the lieutenant was right. Siskin had to add power and climb out of his smooth glide slope to make the runway threshold. But he did manage a beautiful touchdown.
“Tomorrow we practice landings,” Tveretin said.
And practice we did. I flew five sorties that day and racked up three touch-and-go landings. After we put the airplane to bed that evening, Tveretin turned to me and coolly stated, “If the weather’s halfway decent tomorrow, you will solo.” That night it was hard to fall asleep.
And the next morning after one quick circuit of the course, my thirty-eighth training sortie at Pirsagat, the deputy squadron commander pronounced me ready to solo.
“Good luck, Zuyev,” was all the lieutenant said.
Taxiing out to the runway felt completely familiar. But I didn’t hear Tveretin’s terse comments in my earphones. When I turned onto the centerline and ran up my engine for the instrument check, I somehow still expected to hear his voice. It was hard to believe that I was the only man in the plane.
I released the brakes. The L-29 was supposedly slow on takeoff. The fellows said you had time to smoke a cigarette before you reached rotation speed. But on this sunny autumn morning in Azerbaijan, the takeoff roll seemed impossibly quick.
I was climbing straight above the runway. The gear was up and I raised my flaps at 300 feet altitude, just as Tveretin had taught me, before I fully realized I was flying solo. Then I banked right and climbed to fly the oval three-circuit krug pattern at 1,800 feet without incident. Once I was level, I craned my neck to look in the rear cockpit to make sure no one was there. I burst into a loud rendition of the Volga folk song “Stepan Razin,” which celebrated a brave and audacious rebel from czarist times. That was exactly how I felt, brave and daring.
I was less than three months past my eighteenth birthday, and I had just soloed in a jet aircraft.
When my class returned to Armavir that December, we found that the Air Force had ordered a complete landscaping of the parklike campus. The old laurel and plane trees that had provided pleasant shade in the summer — and welcome concealment for cadets following the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” to slip over the far wall and into town — were hacked down. The quaint old model of the MiG-15 rotating above the mossy fountain in the parade ground was demolished, replaced by an abstract sculpture of a missile, which the cadets quickly dubbed the “Monument to Hockey Players,” because of its resemblance to stacked hockey sticks.
Our third semester began just after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. Official publications, including Red Star, all proclaimed satisfaction that Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had allowed the Army to fulfill its “internationalist duty.” In January a political administration colonel from the military district headquarters in Rostov lectured us about the events in Afghanistan. The colonel was unusually informative because he had helped plan the operation. He went through the predictable rationalization for the Soviet invasion, explaining that it had been our duty to protect Socialist democracy in that fraternal country, which was under attack by medieval Muslim fanatics, who had murdered many Soviet citizens struggling to improve backward conditions in Afghanistan.
Then the colonel described the actual invasion in great detail. He noted how Spetsnaz forces had been infiltrated into Kabul, the capital, where they had seized the international airport, which became an airhead for the Airborne intervention force. Our forces had completely overwhelmed the Islamic bandits who had resisted them. Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan prime minister who had betrayed his Socialist principles, had been “eliminated,” the colonel added. Socialist democracy would soon be restored, despite the machinations of the imperialists, who were trying to stir up resistance among the bandits.
He reassured us that the Armavir curriculum would not be accelerated because of Afghanistan.
As I sat in the darkened auditorium, I marveled at the organization and precision of the operation. I was a member of a powerful professional military organization that acted with courageous resolve when necessary.
When we returned to Pirsagat for advanced L-29 training in March, the focus was on navigation, formation flying, and acrobatic and combat maneuvers, which prepared us to fly the higher performance MiG-21FM. This was a transition aircraft that would sharpen our skills for assignments to combat regiments equipped with the supersonic MiG-23.
Cross-country navigation over the Azerbaijan desert was a real challenge. Some guys got lost and made it back to base with only the proverbial “bucket of fuel” remaining in their tanks. In such cases, Soviet aviators could switch to radio channel 4 and request a radio-direction-finding (RDF) fix to guide them back to base. Our controllers at Pirsagat were often Central Asians who spoke with strong accents in Russian. But there was one fluent, unaccented Russian voice that sometimes answered on that frequency. It belonged to an Iranian who would try to guide an unwary young Soviet cadet over the border into Iran. We were told that he worked for the American CIA. That was one more pitfall to avoid.
Our training climaxed that summer with a formal maneuver competition among the cadets. We flew a set of increasingly difficult maneuvers over a three-day period, each sortie flown with a different judge in the backseat.
The first maneuvers were relatively simple, involving horizontal figure eights that had to be entered and exited at exact, predetermined headings and speeds. But as the competition progressed, we had to fly double spins and split-S’s, again entering the maneuver at a precise compass heading and exiting at a prearranged altitude and speed. I had practiced this stage of the competition repeatedly. I knew exactly when to chop the throttle, how hard to pull back on the stick, and how much rudder pressure was needed. I scored well on the first two days.
But on the third day of the competition, we had to integrate the vertical, horizontal, and speed elements. I began the last series of maneuvers at an altitude of 9,000 feet and a speed of 270 knots. As before, I had mentally rehearsed the exact sequence many times. By the time I was in my second rolling climb to 9,000 feet, I realized I was almost finished with the hardest segment of the competition and that I had made very few mistakes.
That afternoon the instructors met to compile the cadets’ cumulative scores. The unattainable perfect competition score totaled 400 points. When they posted the results that evening, I had scored highest with a tally of 380.
From my point of view, the positive result of our transfer to the VVS was the sudden announcement that the Air Force had chosen Armavir as the first pilots’ academy for an experimental accelerated flight-training program. A select group of cadets from my class were to phase directly from the L-29 trainer to the MiG-23 advanced jet fighter. In the past, both PVO and VVS cadet pilots had to spend several years mastering the complexities of the high-performance MiG-21 before qualifying to fly a “third generation” aircraft like the MiG-23.
