Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport in Siberia, Russia began operations on July 12th 1957 with the first passenger flight in a Tupolev 104 to Russia.
3,600m of active Runway is just enough to allow the An-225 to take-off when fully loaded, plenty of room here for pretty much anything. With another 3,605m runway under contruction. UNNT has 2 pax terminals and one cargo terminal, along with 61 aircraft stands. More than 1.87 million passengers passed through in 2007.
New runway under construction
Until the new runway has been finished, this is the only one UNNT has!
Plenty of radar though (and they're all animated!!)
A shot of the Terminal with 2 air bridges with another just off to the left
The only 'big' hangar on the airport....big isn't the right word, this thing is bloody HUGE!
Another shot of the terminal, this time closer up, and with the other air bridge visible
The tower and err....a lighthouse?
Enough of the airport, the real reason I was here is because of this.
Cubana are due to receive an Ilyushin 96-300 to add to their fleet, built in Moscow, this Il-96 was sent to UNNT for some flight tests. With those complete, this is the last time Russia will see this Cubana plane around their skies. From here it begins a long journey across Europe and then down to Cuba.
Basking in the morning sun before engine start
Checking the Soloviev PS90A turbofan engines with 35,300lb of thrust each, and this thing has 4 of them.
The Russian chopper that was flying overhead before, taking snapshots of the airport had come back and snapped this great shot for us!
Starting engine one....oh right! Switches over here are up for on!
All engines on and running fine...taxi, and beacon lights on please.
Fully loaded with fuel, our thrust levers were up half way just to get this thing moving!
There's that hangar again...hey! I see someone standing outside, there's a comparison as to how huge that hangar was
Rolling past the tower with a heck of a noise, but doesn't it look gorgeous?
Being a Russian aircraft, there's a lot to do during takeoff, so no shots until I just get in the air.
Gear up please, and we're away. Phew, not much runway left after that takeoff either, good thing we weren't flying the An-225 today!
Unfortunately while flying over Afganistan, the plane was intercepted by two USAF FA18F fighter jets, and with a non English speaking crew, were unable to communicate with the pilots of the F18s. The end result wasn't a pleasing sight, pieces of a freshly built Russian airliners scattered over 13km of the Afganistan mountains. Reports from the pilots of the two F18s said the aircraft didn't look hostile, but when they saw two men waving their arms about in the cockpit, they thought it to be a hi-jacking and the aircraft was heading for a US base in Afganistan. Most of the plane was destroyed in the initial explosion from all the fuel on board exploding, the F18 pilots thought it was a bomb.
Aircraft is Samdim's Il-96 with Edward Cox's Cubana repaint. Scenery is UNNT which I got from avsimrus.com, along with many more GREAT sceneries from there. Avsimrus.com is just avsim.ru, being translated into English for us who can't read Russian. It's not all translated, but translated enough to figure the rest out yourself. Plenty more to be had from there too, fantastic sounds, panels etc. Sorry about the total size of all the shots, but the quality really needed to be shown with all this.
, Russia was a little late in devolping Hi-Bypass turbofans , 20 years later they are making up for lost time . 
