2011 Articles

Airports >> Russia: Moscow-Domodedovo - Arctic Adventure Part 10 Dawn broke on the group's last day in Russia, and with a morning tour of Domodedovo booked before an afternoon flight back to London, everyone hoped it wouldn't be similar to the disaster experienced days previously. With this, the tenth and final episode, Paul Filmer brings his Arctic Adventure to a close.

First things first and our final wonderful "breakfast" was taken at the Aerotel Hotel before we all checked out. This is the closest hotel to the airport and it's more than comfortable - nice clean rooms and a couple of bars but the food really does leave something to be desired. You can find better eats in the wilds of Siberia believe me, if only they could sort it out it would be the perfect place to stay. Anyway, we walked back to the airport for the usual security formalities and identification badge issue, before heading to our airside bus outside via flight operations. The conversation was a little tense, understandably, and we just waited to see where we would actually be taken.

First stop was the maintenance ramp which is where things always used to kick off - but so far so good. This is the area where you can usually find the most interesting aircraft and we were driven to the far end and allowed off the bus adjacent to where an immaculate Rossiya Il-18 was parked. Sometimes these aircraft are off limits to photographers as they form part of the government fleet, but who were we to pass up an opportunity like that in such fantastic light? I've found that the light in Russia is very often tricky for photography but on this occasion it was fantastic.

Along the line were a couple of Il-76s - one from the FSB, MChS Rossii and a new one for me, an airframe from Alrosa in its regular, immaculately clean, scheme. A lovely Atlant-Soyuz Tu-154 for VIP flights was also parked here along with an MChS Rossii Il-62, a Tu-154 belonging to Zapolarye (now flying in Iran) and a Mi-8 in UTAir colours but devoid of titles. The single western aircraft on this line was a Boeing 737-300 in Air Union colours.

The taxiways, which were populated by Tu-154s, were mostly empty and many of the Il-62s, previously seen parked on the grass were missing, presumed scrapped. We stopped next to the southerly runway and were told we could have a few hours at that location. We couldn't really be bothered with asking to look around the ramps after our last visit and, as they were using this runway to land and the sun was on our backs, we decided to simply hang out where we were. There were lots of large steps scattered around so we used these to get a better perspective for the photos.

It was well over an hour before we saw a single Russian built aircraft movement and, in the couple of hours we spent there, there were only two Tu-134s. A pretty sad state of affairs it has to be said and this, combined with new staff who seemed to have no interest in helping us out, meant it will most probably have been be my last visit to this airport. There really isn't much here to interest me anymore, with at least 85% of the aircraft now being cheap western aircraft due to the failed economy. What a shame.

Well that's the final part of my Arctic trip. It had its highs and lows but I wouldn't have traded it for the world. Russia is such an interesting place to visit aviation wise if you can get there.

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