Trip to Chita

My country is big.

When guys who live in Moscow come to their offices, their mates in Vladivostok return to their homes. It will take you about 9 hours of flight from Moscow to Vladivostok and still there will be a place to fly, because Russia doesn't end with Vladivostok.

One of my recent flights was to Chita. It took me 5 hours and a half to get there. Non an unusual local route, as you could understand from above. We also use to fly to Irkutsk (4.7h), Ulan-Ude (5.2h) and Yakutsk that is more than 6 hours of flight on B737 from Moscow.


All of them are located to the East, and so, all return trips usually take a longer time. In my case, it took us 6h40min to get to Moscow from Chita.

If I would fly for 6h40min to the West from Moscow I will cross all Europe for sure and end flying somewhere over Atlantic. So, could you imagine the size of Russia?

My country is huge and we have a lot of land to explore because the density of people living to the east of Urals is very low comparing with the size of Siberia and Far East lands. The first thought that appears in the mind is that the aviation must obviously be well developed in such regions, but it isn't true. Big cities are not connected with each other and in many situations you should fly to Moscow first and then fly back to the East, to you destination.

--==(o)==--

Though we fly to Chita since 2009 I was there only three times. I've opened that route for my company in September, 2009 and then I visited Chita in May, 2011. After it I visited it once because of the weather in Ulan-Ude (we landed in Chita).

As I am the "office pilot" most of my time, I have no chances to be assigned on that route by crew planning. Therefore, I had to request this flight and the main reason was that one of our first officers, my good friend, Nail suggested me to fly together and try the dish called "buuza". We are the fans of it! It is a national dish of Buryatia, of of the republics in Russian Federation. We fly to Ulan-Ude, its capital, but in summer time my company sets another aircraft type on this route.

Yes, there were other reasons, also :) I enjoy flying with Nail because he is a talented guy and I want to help him to become a good Commander in future.



Another reason was that Chita gives you a chance to make a nice visual approach, that is not very popular among pilots in my country. Yes, there is an ILS approach, but it will give you another 40+ km of flight to build the route to final, and the glideslope isn't stable because of the interference of the mountains.

And the visual approach is rather simple and if you know how to fly such approaches, you surely will enjoy it.

So, I agreed with the proposal.



This flight starts in the evening. You take off when most of normal people sleep. You fly several hours to the East and meet the sunrise at the end of the flight.

If you've had a good rest before the flight, this flight isn't very difficult - after arriving you go to the hotel and have 24h rest before return trip.

But something went wrong from the very beginning of our journey...

--==(o)==--

Our flight started with the delay because the aiplane arrived rather late. So we had to wait for the arrival firts.

And after we finished the borading, and started our engines start recieved thr message from the ground man that he observes the oil drops falling down from our left engine. That is a good reason for shutdown so we had to do it.

As it would obviously amaze the passengers, I took the microphone and described the situation. We called the maintenance and asked for the stairs, and had to wait them for another dozen of minutes.

After consulting we decided to make a run up of the left engine while it would be observed by the technicians. I've described the situation to my passengers again, because it would be even more amazing for them if the engine would be shut again without any positive information from the crew. That is whyt it is very helpful that the Captain prepares the public for the show.

So, we did it and found everything OK. Shut the engine again, filled the papers, closed the doors... And finally, began our flight...



...But very soon we stopped again.

This evening one of the two runways was blocked by the emergency aircraft, which landed without the nose gear extended. For unknown reason we didn't have this information onboard and faced the problem ony when saw lots of planes ahead of us on the taxiway, and lots of ligths in the air - the light of the planes intended to land on the single working runway.

So we wasted more than an hour in that jam.



We worried about the fuel but fortunately we were loaded one ton of cargo below the estimate (and burned appx 800 kg of extra fuel during taxiing). So it gave a decrease of inglight fuel consumption and we got to Chita without a problem.



Sunrise



22:22 UTC



And finally we arrived to Chita. As I had wished we made a visual approach and it was really amazing - because of the departing traffic the controller didn't give the clearance to descend and we found ourselves very high on that approach. We needed to expand our "curcuit" taking into account the mountains, I've called for an early flap and gear extension that gave us a good descent gradient - everything was unstandard but we did it nice in my point of view.

Hi, Chita!







The sky is cloudy



Russian Be-200. She is used to fight with the forest fires.

This hydroplane is able to glide through the lake or the river filling the tanks and then deliver it to the fire.



Aeroflot B737. Very unexpected coincidence happened that morning - in the Aeroflot crew Nail met his colleague from the flight school!

Moreover, there was their colleague in the Aeroflot crew that was going to fly to Moscow! :)





Some photos from Chita




1. Car parking near the Terminal. The writings say "We will come to a win of communistic labour. V.Lenin" and "Our aim is Communism!"

Very funny.





In the hotel.

Captain's room







Russian Landrover - UAZ Hammer



Сentral Square named in the honour of Lenin. Many of the Russian towns still has Lenin squares or streets.



Mr. Lenin







Chita aborigens

The word means "The Victory"













The interior near the restaurant - very cute pictures taken in Soviet 80's and 70's







Restaurant staff in 192



Several years later



1979 fashion





Open Air. These people came here to celebrate the day of the Railroad Worker.









Evening





I visited the spa and had a very good dinner, specially cooked for crews :)

--==(о)==--

Next morning was also rainy.






iPad navigation update











Thanks for your attention! See you!

FLY SAFE!