John Farley wrote:
Right from the beginning of my contacts with the MiG team, I had reasoned that they had no more control over their political circumstances than we as pilots had over ours.
Undoubtedly! It was the same when we hosted the Gorbachev / Thatcher meeting at Brize. At the pre-meeting, with some Sov embassy people, MoD goons and senior Aeroflot aircrew, after one particularly anal piece of nonsense from the MoD goons ("Don't let them have the Lyneham ramp co-ordinates"), the Sov aircrew and I exchanged glances - "You have wanquerres in your air force too!" being the obvious unspoken message.
Come the day, it was great fun - apart, that is, for the poor sweating KGB chap who'd been left at the Gateway by his colleagues and had to huff and puff his way back to the Il-62 in his standard issue raincoat worried that someone might think he was a defector!
On the jet I was in, the senior hostie was a bit Rosa Klebb until we thanked her for inviting us to have a coffee. Whereupon she instantly transformed into a smiling prep school matron and ushered her lovely girls forward to serve us with some superb coffee and delicious Russian chocolate. Once the aircrew had worked out that we were just ordinary RAF aircrew and not some MoD spooks, we had a very congenial time in their nice warm aircraft. There was also a rather attractive Russian-speaking female USAF navigator, who was sent to help them with any US airspace queries. On hearing slightly raised voices from the flight deck after she came on board, I asked "Surely you have female aircrew too?". To which they replied "Da - but not like her!".
When the in-flight catering turned up from Heathrow, it came with 2 large poly bags containing greenery. "Bugger me", I thought, "they really do eat cabbage sandwiches!". But there'd been a c
.ock-up - they'd been sent 500g of parsley for garnish, rather than the 50g they'd requested. Half a kilogram of parsley takes up a lot of space!