I wake up. A morning like many others. At a first glance there is nothing spectacular about it. But wait! I look out of the window and the same view comes to my eyes, the sight of Pyongyang city. The day has come. The day that most of us anticipated most. The day of flights. The day that I am going to hop on 5 flights, on 4 different planes, all of them being my first time. The Ilyushin 76,
Ilyushin 62,
Tupolev 154 and the
Mi-17 helicopter. The 18th day of September 2014. A date I surely will remember, not only for the reasons stated above ;)
But step by step. First things first, after breakfast we arrive early in the morning at the airport for our first flight of the day. It surely is going to be a flying start of the day! The Ilyushin 76. A plane designed to transport freight. It is massive. It has a strange design. It requires more crew. It has only a couple of windows on the entire lenght of the fuselage. We are sited sideways to the direction of movement. But I should go so quickly forward. At first, after arriving at the ramp we get a quick photo shoot from the outside, later we board the plane and sit at our convenience (almost, we had to have a seatbelt). And here we are, sitting side to side, face to face, listening to the engines starting, looking around at all the controls visible in the main cabin (one crew member has his station here) (detailed shots are available down below). You can easily feel the movement when inside. The sheer power moves us aside during takeoff. A strange feeling when having almost absolutely no windows. In the air, when we get the appropriate signal from the crew we can start moving around. And as one can believe, jumping, taking pictures with the equipment and crew, walking around, all that took place. After we "smoothly" touch downed (this time on the main gear, I've seen plenty of videos and photos when they land in the front wheels first :D ) reverse thrust has been applied and we taxied slowly to our designated parking position. We later got a chance for a very quick visit in the cockpits for a couple of photos, as the schedule was tight. In all the rush, I took a couple of decent photos. Unfortunately not exactly what I wished for. But hey! You can't have it all at once! Can you?
After the cockpit visit and again, a short session from the outside a bus took us to our next ride. About the experience on it I'll write a different entry some time soon. Now have a look at the Il-76 photos and videos.
