Soaring over the Urals two years ago in a Russian passenger plane with a Russian pilot, Reporter-at-Large Ellery Walter was jerked from contemplating a beautiful sunrise by a sickening sputter in the motor. Realizing the ship was out of gasoline, the pilot tugged frantically at the fuel pump, got a dying burst of power which enabled him to clear some trees by a breath-taking margin, land in a cornfield. When Reporter Walter got his breath back he asked how the fuel could be exhausted just after leaving an airport where barrels of it were available. The pilot, who had not shaved for two weeks, stolidly replied:
"I forgot."
That incident epitomized the impression of observers watching a nation of peasants struggle with an ambitious commercial & military aviation program. The Russians were better than fair flyers, but they were poor mechanics and executives. They were always forgetting something. But no pilot or other participant forgot anything at the U. S. S. R.'s first All-Union Aviation Festival last week. A small crowd of 10,000 spectators trooped out to Moscow's Octobrisky Airport, impassively watched the nation's largest airplane, the giant ANT-14, waddle across the field, lift its saurian tail, lumber aloft. Suddenly in a spatter of color the world's record for mass parachute jumping was broken.* Thirty-six graduates of the Soviet parachute school, some of them women, issued from the side door of the ANT-14 like bees from a hive. Ten others leaped from a bomber. Each 'chute was red. white or blue, and each graduate had remembered to bring along a second colored chute which he released as he floated earthward. Fourteen other jumps during the day brought the total to 60, with no injuries.