My "first time"? Let's see... It would have been a LOT Polish Airlines IL-62 flying WAW-YMX-WAW in the summer of 1980. As far as I can recall (I was 9 back then), I spent most of both flights in the cockpit. What a GREAT trip! ^ ^ ^ To most of my questions of the variety "What is this indicator for?", the pilots simply responded by flying the plane in such a way as to demnostrate. Little did I know that in the back there were quite a few pax grabbing the barf bags

Of course, as a 9-year-old, I was not as preocupied as my parents were with the fact that another LO IL-62 crashed a short while earlier...

In my teen years I have flown these birds quite a few times between WAW and KWI. Some of their design details made them flying death traps, but I still think of them fondly.