 Two Captains - Part Two
I am not going to tell you about those three days which we spent in the tundra in the immediate vicinity of the bank of Pyasina. It is one of the most traumatic recollections of my life and above all, it is a monotonous recollection. One hour was like another, another was like the third, and only the first minutes when we, somehow or other, had to fix the aircraft (because it would be blown away by a blizzard otherwise) did not repeat.
Try doing this in the tundra without any vegetation, in the wind which reaches 10 points! Without killing the engine, we placed the aircraft so that its tail was facing the wind. I think we would have managed to dig it in but the wind carried the snow away as soon as we made an attempt to lift the shovel. The wind kept hurling the craft, therefore it was necessary to think of something faultless because the wind was picking up and it would be too late in half an hour. Then we did a simple thing (I recommend it to all polar pilots): we tied skis….. with a rope to the plane. There was a lot of snow around all these things in fifteen minutes.
Now we had nothing else to do but to wait. It was not fun but it was the only thing we were able to do. To wait – no one knew how long.
I have already mentioned the fact that we had all the necessary equipment for a forced landing. But what will you do, let’s say, with a tent once you are not in a cockpit? It is a difficult and agonizing thing to do, the one that you can decide to do only once a day, for it is simply necessary to get out of a cockpit once a day.
Our fingers started to hurt before we managed to untie the shoelaces. Therefore, we had to untie them in three …* Snow knocked us to the ground, so we had to develop a special method of walking.
*I mean that they succeeded in untiying them only for the third time. I can't think of the right word in English.
Last edited by Flash; 22-Oct-2005 at 19:34.
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