Indeed in Kherson there was a great flood of graduates from the country’s aeroclubs. They came from Moscow and Leningrad, Arkhangelsk and Baku, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Minsk, Tashkent and Dushanbe. It was not a military school but OSOAVIAHIM one. Only girls were being accepted in the navigating division and mostly guys in the instructors’.
First of all we were sent for a medical examination. Those who passed would be divided into groups for the general subject exams. The oral exam on mathematics was run by an old lecturer from a teacher’s training college. Convinced that he had poor hearing, we helped each other with prompts and most of us received ‘fives’55…
Gradually our numbers were becoming lower and lower — but now we had passed the credentials committee. Following the advice of the Smolensk Comsomol obkom I had said nothing about my elder brother. At long last the lists of those accepted were posted up. I read: “Egorova — to the navigating division”. There was no such great boisterous joy in my heart as back in Ulyanovsk but nevertheless I ran to a post-office and sent my mum a telegram — I wanted to make her happy for a while. Yes, to make her happy by letting her know her daughter had been accepted into flying school!
When she got my telegram from Kherson my mum replied with a letter, which I have kept.
My dearest, greetings!
I got your telegram. I am happy for you. But I would be happier if you were not striving for the sky. Are there really no good occupations on the ground? Your friend Nastya Rasskazova graduated from veterinary college, lives at home, treats livestock in the kolkhoz and her mum has no trouble at all. But you — all of my kids — are somehow driven, always want to achieve something and strive for something.
There is no news from Vasen’ka. Ah, my girl, my heart’s been tormented with suffering about him. Is he still alive, my dear boy? I remember coming to Moscow to see him and he’d already become a director and some kind of Deputy. He put his leather jacket on me, linked his arm in mine and walked me to a theatre. And there were mirrors all over the place in there and I actually thought, why are there people looking like us walking past — what a surprise! If you could only put in a good word for him…
But you do your studies, do your best. What can be done now if you have already fallen in love with your aviation and you are doing well in it. If you — my kids — are happy I am happy too. If you grieve — I — your mother — grieve too.
I’ve got eight of you — my children, and I am uneasy for all of you. All of you — my baby birds — have flown away. I’ve seen the last one — Kostya — off to the Army. I ordered him to serve faithfully and honestly but when the train had begun to disappear behind a turn I fell over onto the platform unconscious. What has happened to me — I am at a loss…
Oh, mama, mama! How could I explain to you what flying meant to me? It was my life, my song, my love! He who has flown into the sky — found his wings — will never betray it and will be faithful to it till the end, and if it happens that he can no longer fly he’ll dream of flying even so…
I liked the way the teachers in our school conducted the lessons. The most interesting classes were run on meteorology by an old retired sea captain who had ploughed all the seas and oceans. He was the idol of us all! The captain would enter the lecture room with his head proudly raised in a peaked service cap with a very high crown. We would all stand up to greet the captain, and looking at his meticulously ironed and made-to-measure uniform I would want so much to look like him! But the captain was not tall at all, had deep-set eyes that looked at us kindly and respectfully. The captain would begin each lecture with an ancient superstition: “If the sun sets in a cloud, navigator beware a gale…” Or he would recall another proverb related to our future occupation.
For the first time I understood what a good teacher was: he loved his profession, was addicted to it, and would not only impart good knowledge but would also inculcate in his listeners a love of the subject. Studying was easy for me. After all I had already worked as an instructor! We studied the theory of flying and, of course, flew — on two-seat U-2, UT-1 and UT-2 trainers.
The war against Finland sped up our graduation. They abruptly shortened, ‘rounded off’ the training program and took us through to the exams, which we also sat in a hurry. They didn’t even manage to tailor us uniforms and we graduated in the old blouses and skirts we’d worn as cadets.
After graduation I was transferred to the Kalinin City aeroclub to work as the aeroclub navigator. But it turned out on site that there already was a navigator in the aeroclub but they were short of a pilot-instructor. I really wanted to fly and happily agreed to take up that position. After a test of my flying techniques I was permitted to train student pilots and was assigned to a group of 12 men. The guys were different in their general level of training, physical development and character. They were united by one quality — their passion for aviation. Everyone was eager to complete ground training as fast as possible and to begin to fly. And I knew exactly how they felt!
The flight commander Senior Lieutenant Petr Chernigovets came to our classes often. He had been a fighter pilot in the Army and had been sent to the OSOAVIAHIM to “reinforce the training personnel”. Chernigovets was really a skilled flyer, knew mathematics and physics well and easily explained cumbersome aerodynamics formulas. The students liked him for his respectful attitude towards them. Petr helped me a lot too. One flying day the senior pilot-instructor Gavrilov crashed. The trainee pilot was thrown out of the plane when it hit the ground, and in the heat of the moment he got up and ran. The surgeons examined him, auscultated him and suspended him from flying. And in five days he was no more… Flights stopped. The students walked around depressed. The flight commander Cherepovets ordered the whole fight to line up to analyse the accident.
“A plane, as you are aware”, he began, “is a plane and no matter how slow and simple it may be, you have to treat it respectfully — in other words, carefully and seriously. The experienced pilot-instructor Gavrilov had relied on his student but the latter neglected the laws of aerodynamics or knew them poorly — and here is the result. During the last turn, as we all saw from the ground, the plane nosed up, lost speed and fell into a spin. There was not enough altitude to pull the machine out of its critical position and it hit the ground. The profession of pilot”, Chernigovets continued, “is not only romantic but dangerous as you have seen for yourselves. But there is no point being down in the dumps, let’s get down to business!”
And he began to draw right there, on the sand, various plane positions in the air simultaneously explaining and asking one or another student. It helped the guys get over it.
For an instructor the first independent flight of his student is an event just like his own. I remember that the student-pilot Chernov was the first one from my group to be sent by me into the air. The detachment commander had already approved it but I was uneasy and requested the squadron commander to fly with him once more. The comesk56 made a circular flight with Chernov and yelled “Why waste plane resources, let him go!”
I took the signal flags with emotion as the instructor Miroevskiy had done long ago. Everyone was watching the trainee pilot as he sat in the cockpit, focused and serious, and waited for permission to take off. I raised the white flag and then swiftly stretched my arm out showing the direction along the airstrip with the flag.