Originally Posted by
aloominumtoob
When I flew with Antonov on the 12s:
Captain Normal left hand seat.
First Officer right hand seat.
Navigator in the nose .
Flight Engineer on the seat between the pilots.
Radio Operator behind and lower than First officer.
There was another seat behind and lower than the Captain.
The rest of us were in the area behind the flight deck.
I never flew on other company's 12s so can only tell you what our layout was. The aeroplane, to many looked strange with the anhedral on the wings, but have you ever watched a duck come into land? Nice to fly on and not too noisy.
The cargo compartment was unpressurised, so all the crew, both operating and loading/technical crew were accomodated in the pressurised capsule at the front.
Hope this helps.
ALT
On the Bulgarian ones I flew in I recall the flight engineer being very active on start-up with his seat raised and swung out five feet above the lower cockpit floor to put him between the pilots (whose seats are well above the higher deck to the pax compartment). There seemed to be a lot of manual intervention and great attention paid to EGT - probably manual enrichment to accelerate the engines.
The thing was a brute to fly, I did 20 minutes and that was plenty, iirc it had no autopilot but a very basic wing-leveller or perhaps just a heading hold, the yoke was as heavy as parking a fully loaded Bedford 3 tonner. It took
force to move it. istr the pilots teamed up on the controls during landing. A bit of a runway eater too but faster and higher than a Herc. (which they said they admired greatly).
As said above the crew compartment was cosy with 4 seats facing each other over a table like on a train plus a decent window and plenty of space opposite on the stbd side, room there for 2 or 3 more crew to sit on boxes or whatever. Best view ever though from the nav's glazed nose.
Cargo bay was unpressurised but even the civil ones had oxygen rails down the whole length of it with spigots every couple of feet for troops/paras.