On 4 August 2011 the expedition on ultralight aircrafts timed to the 75th anniversary of Valery Chkalov’s flight to the Far East was completed. As a reminder, the expedition set off from a small airfield near Moscow on 12 July 2011. The pilots wrote in the crew’s blog that they successfully reached the Island of Chkalov and placed a new memorial plaque on the spot the famous pilot had landed.
It can now be asserted with certainty that the expedition was very successful. For Coordination Center for TLD RU as was one of the expedition’s sponsors, contribution to this flight was yet another step on the way to promotion of ccTLD domains across Russian regions. At the stops, the pilots, who stirred up a real excitement in many Russian cities, were engaged in educational activities related to the insignia on the wings of the flex-wing trikes – logos of Coordination Center and Technical Center of Internet. At the final stage of the expedition, in the city of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, the pilots, according to Alexander Scherbakov, were met by “a whole delegation including the city administration to local TV and curious children.”
In all, the pilots successfully flew about 9,000 km from Moscow to the Island of Chkalov. The route passed over more than 30 Russian cities, including Nizhniy Novgorod, Kazan, Nizhnekamsk, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Chita, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, among others.
The expedition’s flex-wing trikes were equipped with reliable 100-hp engines used by the pilots of ultralight aviation worldwide, and, while many sections en route proved very challenging, the pilots managed them all and make it back for Moscow safe and sound.
