Originally Posted by Gardyloo

The coolest thing (for flying fans) was the seriously cool TU-114 eggbeater (with its counter-rotating props) that took us from Leningrad to Tashkent overnight. The in-flight meal was memorable - a (real) PVC bag containing a hard cooked egg, a piece of slate roofing tile black bread with a little tub of red goo, and a whole cucumber. Comrades, the harvest goal for cucumbers has been exceeded! Hail the hero farmers!



Then they tried to kill us on a hideously underpowered IL-62 on TAS-SVO. Because of density altitude (high elevation, 40C) the pilot decided to do power tests on the engines while we sat on the apron. He turned off the air conditioning in the cabin (to preserve power?) while he did this, and by the time we rolled the inside of the plane was, oh, say, a million degrees. Some old Uzbek gent in the full outfit jumped out of his seat and started howling and running around; he was gang-tackled by the (sturdy) FAs who strapped him into his seat using belt extenders. When we finally took off, the driver used 101% of the paved runway. The Indian man (from Mumbai) next to me said he was afraid of fainting.

Once we were wheels up and clear (just) of the trees, the skipper turned back on the a/c (or maybe opened a window) and the temperature fell right now - so fast that the perspiration in the cabin's air didn't have time to get cleared, so it condensed on anything metal in the cabin and.... rained on us. Nice.