Flight to St. Petersburg
We flew from Samara to St. Petersburg. As we approached the airport, we had to go through at least one checkpoint. The checkpoint consisted of a guard shack and a barrier across the roadway. Since communism was dead, the checkpoint was no longer staffed by officials who checked papers and guards with machine guns.
A lone woman was there, and all that she did was lift the barrier for us to drive through. This was her job, and she did the job for which she was paid. Most people would have just tied the barrier in the up position and stayed home.
We first went to the waiting room. It was a concrete block room with no amenities of any kind. It had no toilet, but the back of the room was used as the toilet. Of course, it smelled to high heaven, but this is Russia, and this is what you get.
Larry, our host, somehow got a bus to come and pick us up, and take us to the waiting area for the pilots. There we were offered food and snacks. It was not fancy but had toilets and was a vast improvement over the previous area.
When it was time for us to board the airplane, a bus came to pick up our group of four people. When we arrived at the airplane, two buses filled with people from to stinky waiting area we seated in, it was hot and humid, so they were suffering.
We pulled up and boarded the airplane. We took whatever seats that we wanted. One seat wasn’t even bolted to the floor. After we were seated, the rest of the passengers were allowed to board.
I was afraid that these passengers would be quite hostile to us. After all, we had gotten out of the stinky area to who knows where, and now we had priority seating while they sat in hot buses.
That isn’t what happened at all. First off, they were used to “important people” treating them like dirt. As soon as they discovered that we were Americans, they were very friendly and curious about us.
Larry was our translator, and I suspected that he filtered some questions. Knowing that people would be curious about us, I had a small photo album with back-to-back single photos showing a bit about our life.
We built our house, and I mean by our hands. That wasn’t impressive because Russians were used to making their dachas for gardens by hand with materials from any source possible. Later a Russian Ham radio visitor stayed at our house and commented that a high official in the communist party didn’t have such a beautiful house.
One photo was taken from a personal friend’s helicopter, and it showed three cars at the house. Russians were astonished by three cars. I tried to explain that all three were old cars and not worth much. We were told that to have a single car in Russia was the same as being a millionaire in America, and we had three cars.
The flight had an attendant that we might be tempted to call a flight attendant. Her only action was to try to sell passengers her jewelry products.
The toilet had no towels or running water.
Since I have a private pilot’s license, I have some knowledge of how a plane is operated. I was quite impressed with the high quality of every landing.
Updated 30 March 2023