Tu-134 is my favorite airliner. I love the noise, the smell, the long open overhead luggage shelf, an oddity that disappeared from the other airliners in the 1960s - more modern commercial aircraft come equipped with lockable overhead storage bins, the rattle, its clumsy collapsible 1960s seats and its fantastic round windows which look as if they came right from hull of Jules Verne's Nautilus. And there is a window in the lavatory's ceiling. In the last few years whenever I had an opportunity to fly in Russia I chose flights operated by a Tu-134 knowing well that they slowly disappear. Not merely they fall pray to airline accidents, which are just that, accidents, but because the beautiful machines, contemporaries of later models of the equally though differently majestic Sud Aviation Caravelle, are scrapped. Only 25 are still flying commercially in Russia out of 850 that had been manufactured between 1966 and 1982 (by some accounts 1984) for then Soviet Aeroflot and export markets.
While I am not going to lament the loss of Russian aviation industry that has by now happened, due to insatiable avarice of Muscovite nomenklatura that usurped power in the country, because the aviation industry was not the only loss Russia suffered at the hands of her internal enemies in the last 20 years or talk about the air crash itself because I am not qualified to talk about it though my sympathies go out to the families of the passengers and crew members, regardless of whether the crash was caused by a crew error as it is now alleged or something else, I will say a few things about the pathological extent of the Muscovite state's centralization. When one hears (sad) news of a plane crash in the USA or Brazil, planes crash from time to time, one would have no idea where did the incident occur unless the geographic location of the crash, the origin and destination of the flight were mentioned in the news. When my associate told me today on my way to the Czech police station (I took my driving license theory exam in Czech language and driving test, I passed both) that a plane crashed near Petrazovodsk, I was about 90% certain that the plane departed from Moscow. Why? Because everything in the so-called Russian Federation goes either through Moscow, to Moscow or from Moscow. Even the old Soviet Union had far less centralized system of governance than today's Russian Federation, and when it came to the internal air travel, it had a denser, better managed and more affordable route network. Under the soft authoritarian system that emerged in the dark era of Eltsin (for some reason the villain's name tends to be written as Yeltsin by the enemy ), which ascendancy is maintained by the rule of two dwarfish puppets who succeeded him more or less appointment, the system which sole reason for existence is maintenance of unlimited personal power by a few usurpers and fabulous personal enrichment of a few thieves, all based in Moscow, through exploitation and theft of resources from entire Russia, hypercentralization was if not natural, as there is nothing natural about Russian Federation in its present shape, but at least an expected outcome. So when I heard that a plane crashed near Petrazovodsk, I was quite sure where it flew from as one did not have to be a genius to make an intelligent guess that probably the plane was not flying from Paris, Tokyo, Kiev, Novgorod or Samara and that in all likelihood Moscow, yes Moscow, was somehow involved. Because in the anti-Russian Russian Federation Moscow is involved in everything and it is the origin of Russia's doomed flight.
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