By the end of the working day soldiers from different groups appeared one by one, carrying testing equipment and instruments. The whole plane – all its components and systems – were divided among three to four groups, each of them had its own shelter on wheels which served as a storeroom for parts and a small workshop for small and quick repairs.
The attitude to instruments in the aviation is special, a forgotten screwdriver or pliers could get anywhere during the take-off and height gain: into the elements of elevators or ailerons control system, into the gear leg; vibration or rolling motion could make any forgotten screwdriver to move somewhere, and it could result in a plane crash.
So when technicians and mechanics were leaving the shelter to provide servicing to planes, they checked the availability of the whole set of instruments, after they worked with the planes – checked again, and then again when returning to the shelter.
If there was a shortage, almost the whole squadron started to look for the missing instruments. No plane could take off until the screwdriver was found. There surely were such cases, but they were quite rare and the instruments were quickly found. At best, the guilty one got off with a few extra duties.
But once a young soldier forgot all the instruments at once on the plane, the whole iron case. It was found in less than five minutes, but the whole squadron where it happened flipped! Nobody remembered anything like that – forgetting all at once…
Moreover all the instruments were branded: they contained eight or ten digits, the first two stood for the last two digits of the unit number, two more – the service group number, then the number of instrument on the list and something else. If these were, for example, pliers or nippers, the brand was put on both parts.
This topic was the theme of numerous jokes. Each AN-12, besides a lot of different equipment, contained an ordinary broom with a long handle, used to remove snow from the plane where it was difficult to reach or to sweep inside the plane, and there was also a whisk broom. But the ordinary broom was used more often.
Once several technicians were sitting in a spacious smoking room after dinner. A chief of regiment staff – the half colonel – came in. His position did not imply flying, it was more of a bureaucratic character, for there were a lot of papers, plans and reports in the regiment. The chief was always bemused about something, and this time, too, he was thinking about something connected with his service, smoking a Belomor cigarette…
And then one of the technicians decided to joke and asked half colonel if they should brand the brooms. The chief said in surprise: Haven’t you branded them yet? The jaws of all the technicians in the smoking room dropped. The technician who tried to joke said: and where should we brand it – on the handle? The half colonel replied: yes, on the handle and on each twig separately…
On the whole, officers and warrant officers in the air regiment were mainly young, aged from 20 to 35. There was less than a tenth of those aged forty and over. So when they had a little free time, they played the fool as they could.
They did so especially in winter: they liked to dump somebody in the snowdrift or just play snowballs. They removed a small entrance ladder to the shelter of the neighboring service group and quickly put up a hill of snow. A technician who went out of the shelter did not suspect anything, made a step and… felt a bit of a paratrooper during his very first jump.
Having shaken off the snow and sworn, he shouted – we are being attacked! The other members of his group flew out of the shelter to be attacked by those who had removed the ladder! It was funny just like in childhood – a pig pile of officers, warrant officers and soldiers…
When the squadron engineer, a mustached and stern major, the oldest of all those lying in the snow, came out of his separate shelter upon hearing the noise, he shouted: Stop playing the fool in the snow!
Also, pilots and technicians had a special approach to dividing into teams: those married played against the bachelors, and the bachelors beat the married more often somehow. Sometimes the mustached played against the shaven, and very rarely the pilots played against the service staff that worked on the land.
The games were not very frequent: there was one day off – Sunday, and not everybody had a day off on the same day.
A plane, the more so – a pilot, should fly. The whole regiment flew almost every other day. The first and fourth squadrons on one day, the second and third on the next one. There were day and night flights, training and operational flights. A part of the regiment was on constant business trips upon the tasks given at the launch site: they flew all over the country, sometimes the plane returned in two or three days, sometimes in two weeks.
Sometimes the flying line was half empty, and then the regiment gathered again, but almost never completely. The days of operational flights were always the most strenuous ones. Technicians and mechanics prepared almost twenty planes for the flight, pilots had pre-flight trainings, studied the plan of flights.
All the maintenance groups worked on different planes, each in accordance with its profile, sometimes almost all of them gathered on one which had to fly first, and then dozens of technicians and mechanics swarmed in all parts of the plane at once. After preparing this one they started working on others.
Pre-flight preparation, preliminary preparation, preparation for a second flight and post-flight one, and also regular maintenance work on different elements and the whole plane… there were many of them. Finally the planes were ready, the crews started checking and launching the engines.
There are four of them on AN-12, each almost 4 00 °CV… The airfield is covered by deep rumble, and the planes go to the steering paths one by one, then to the take-off runway and disappear above the taiga. The airfield gets empty, and technicians can have a little rest.
Now the first plane returns and drives to its line, the technicians go there again to prepare it for the second flight. One more returns, now everybody goes to this one, and all the planes that fly on this day or night follow the same procedure. Having accomplished the flying task, the plane returns to its line for good. The technicians carry out the post-flight preparation, the plane is fuelled to the full and stays there to rest.
It happens to every plane that flies on that day. Finally everybody is back on the line, all the planes are checked and fuelled, and the airfield grows quiet. The tired pilots and land maintenance workers return home or to the barracks. The airfield is closed and passed for guard to the field squadron.
The procedure is the same every other day. During flights sometimes there were small pauses, one or two hours long: planes landed on the airfield to make room for another rocket in the sky.
The best season is summer: the clothes are light, and you don’t have to uncover the plane before the flight and cover it back again afterwards.
-7-
Lost in his everyday affairs of MS 88 crew commander, Sergey felt strange easiness and better performance of brain, mind or probably all senses. It was as if there were two commanders in him: one dealt with the multitude of space affairs, and the other one relived his life on Earth.
In his thoughts he constantly had flashbacks of childhood, studies, smiles of the girls he knew, first flights in the air club, service in the Air Force, but they were getting shorter and shorter and started to feel quite different.
It was as if looking at the life of a person totally strange to himself, that is, quite different. It does look like a split personality, but this diagnosis would not be correct, thought Sergey.
Remembrances of childhood came most often… Was it then that he got his first desire to fly? It is most probably connected with an incommunicable feeling of freedom you had during the longest school holidays – in summer.
Almost every summer he went to the countryside, except for two trips to the seaside and two or three shifts in a pioneer camp. But he enjoyed most of all spending his holidays in the countryside with his numerous grandmothers. In ten years of studying at school in the city, he spent at least two years on holidays in the countryside.
He had only one grandmother, but she had at least ten cousins, and if more distant relatives are taken into account, then a good half of the locals was related to him as well… But it was not the most important thing.
The house doors were almost never locked – the “lock” was usually a wooden spinner nailed to the door frame. If it lay parallel to the ground, the door was locked, if perpendicular, it was open. Sometimes the door was locked with the help of a padlock, but it only happened if the owners went to town for a long time to visit their children.
In summer, the population increased probably twice. Numerous grandsons, granddaughters and great- grandchildren came to visit their grandparents practically from all parts of the huge country. Only on the small
