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17 Daughter, You'll Fall I was sent to the town of Kalinin1 to become the aeroclub's navigator. When I arrived, I discovered that the aeroclub already had a navigator but badly needed a flight instructor. I jumped at the chance - I had long been yearning to fly. I passed the flight check and began training cadets. I was in charge of twelve restless young men of widely varying temperaments and backgrounds. But their love of aviation bound them together. They could hardly wait to get through their ground training and into the sky. I understood them well. Commander of the flight unit, Senior Lieutenant Pyotr Chernigovets, often attended the lessons. A former fighter pilot in the Red Army, he was a born pilot with an excellent grasp of physics and math. He could explain complex aerodynamics formulas with ease. He respected the cadets, and they loved him for it. He helped me train my first fledgling students. One day, a veteran instructor named Gavrilov crashed during a training flight. The impact threw his student from the cabin. The cadet immediately jumped up and dashed off wildly. The doctors examined him and exempted him from flying for five days, but on the sixth day he died. All flights were cancelled. The cadets were despondent. Lieutenant Chernigovets called the unit together to discuss the incident. "An airplane, as you know, is always an airplane" he began, "no matter how slow and docile it may be. You must call it 'Sir,' and give it the utmost respect, attention, and seriousness. Those who ignore these rules will be punished ! Here we have an experienced instructor who placed too much faith in his student and who apparently ignored the rules of aerodynamics or simply didn't know them well. Here we see the result. In the final turn, as we all saw, the aircraft nosed up, lost speed, and fell into a spin. It didn't have enough altitude to recover from the spin and therefore crashed. "The aviation profession," he continued, "may seem romantic. But it's dangerous, too. Still, we can't lose heart. We must get back to business." He started describing various flight attitudes and drawing them right there in the sand of the airfield, all the while quizzing the cadets. The ice began to break. 1 Now the city of Tver (called Kalinin from 1931 to 1990), located about 104 miles (167 km) northwest of Moscow. 60 RED SKY, BLACK DEATH For a flight instructor, sending a student on his first solo flight is at least as terrifying as his own first solo was. I remember the first student I sent out on his own, a cadet named Chernov. The unit commander had "okayed" him, but I wasn't so sure. I asked the squadron commander to fly with him first. They flew a circle flight, then landed. "Why are you wasting aircraft resources ?" he shouted. "Let him go!" In agitation, I fiddled with the white signal flag, just like the one Miroyevsky had once held for us. All eyes fell upon the student sitting in the cabin, his face fixed in a mask of total concentration, awaiting my order. I raised the white flag and abruptly whipped it in the direction of the runway. Chernov taxied the airplane to the launch position. I wanted to shout some additional instructions after him, but the plane was already rocketing down the runway and tearing itself from the earth. My eyes didn't leave that airplane for a second as I walked to the landing "T" to meet my charge. Then came Cadet Sedov. I had no end of trouble with him. Skills that were easy for Chernov, Sedov mastered ever so slowly. Slowly, but surely, I later discovered. Only after I soloed all twelve of my cadets did I realize that Sedov had less flight time than anyone. I was so busy holding Chernov up as an example, at the same time sending Sedov back to the books for more ground training, that I didn't notice Chernov was simply burning more aviation fuel. In tl1e end, Sedov became the surest and most graceful flyer of all my students. When the State Commission turned up for a surprise flight check, I wasn't worried about my cadets. Only one of them received a "four"2 in aerobatics flying, and the rest got an "outstanding." On Aviation Day, the aerodrome held an air show. Spectators looked on from a roped...

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