In 1993, an assignment from FLYING took me unusually far afield. Somewhere east of Moscow, in the center of a land that had recently ceased to be the Soviet Union and was trying to figure out what it meant to be Russia again, I clung with one hand to my camera and the other to the doorframe of a radial-engined Antonov biplane as it flew low over the Volga.
Alongside and below me flew a Strizh. My Russian dictionary, a relic of college days, translates strizh as “martin” or “sand martin.” Another source offers “martlet,” which is certainly incorrect. Some kind of bird, at any rate. But this strizh was not a bird. It was an airplane of a special kind that the Russians called an ekranoplan.
