Sometime in the early nineties I flew from Mineralnye Voda MRV to Stepanakert in the disputed, besieged, rocketed and unrecognised Republic of Nagorno Karabagh. NKR was by that point fully Armenia, all the Azeri population having been booted out. This of course made the Azeris rather hostile, and they retaliated by blockading the enclave and lobbing all sorts of incoming into it. I was heading in there to report on the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The only way in was on a TU-134 operated by Air Karabagh or some-such - one of the hundreds of Aeroflot spin-offs, the 'babyflots' as we called them then. NKR was surrounded and blockaded, although there was a narrow corridor across the mountains from Stepanakert to Armenia, over which the aircraft flew. A civilian flight into an active warzone - there were several such opportunities in the former and collapsing Soviet Union in the early '90s, and several aircraft were shot down operating them.
It was snowing when I arrived from Moscow at MRV, to catch the flight to Stepanakert. In those days at Russian domestic airports you waited to board not in the terminal, but out on the tarmac, in a line behind a red and white sign board with the destination written on it. You did this even when it was minus heaven-knows-what and the snow was blowing horizontally. An old Gaz 6x6 truck with a MiG engine mounted on the back was driving slowly up and down the taxiway, blasting ice and snow off the tarmac.
Reader, I confess I tarried as long as I could in what passed for the departure area, unwilling to be frozen, deafened and blasted. But eventually a fearsome babushka forced me out into the cold and into the queue for my flight. Imagine my surprise to see that at least half of my fellow passengers were circumventing the Azeri fuel blockade on Stepanakert by carrying, as hand luggage, 20 litre 'jerry cans' of petrol. And, because this was Russia, most of them were smoking like Siberian petrochemical plants.
TU-134 doesn't have overhead lockers. It has what used to be known as 'hat-shelves'. So my fellow passengers stuffed their jerry cans of petrol between their legs, in the hat-racks, in the aisle. The hostie poked her head out of the front galley, took a look, and said 'No Smoking. Seat Belts. We are going now". That was the last we saw of her, as we departed across the mountains in a fog of petrol fumes and cigarette smoke.
You'll have worked out by my post here that our flying bomb didn't explode. Lots of other things did, in the week I was there, but the flight in remains stuck in my mind as the most singularly terrifying aviation experience of my life. To get out, I hitch-hiked on an Armenian army truck across the corridor to Yerevan. That took 48 freezing hours and we were shelled on the way, but it was still better than the flight in.