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Its maker, Yurii Yakovlev, has been flying for 40 years and has dedicated most of his life to designing planes. He once worked at the Antonov plane factory, but in the early 90s, he and his friend opened their own business. Since 1991 they’ve made 1,100 planes, Yakovlev said.
Yakovlev shows off the plane, one that he built for aviation championships. Yet when he saw the results he realized that he could potentially break some records with it as well. His can cover almost 1,500 kilometers on just one fuel tank. So the first record of the length of a flight was broken from the first try.
“Before it was 620 kilometers, but we made it 1,020,” Yakovlev said.
Yakovlev took his daughter Anna as a companion for his record-breaking flight. They took off and went to Balta in the Odessa region and from there to Horishni Plavni in the Poltava region before returning to Makarov airfield. They spent nearly eight hours in the sky without a stop, and later found out, they had also broken a speed record.
“No one ever tried to break such a record, a thousand-kilometer flight on a triangle route. We did it. Our speed was pretty good as well, 123 kilometers per hour,” he said.
As a demonstration, Yakovelv took a plane up to a speed of 200 kilometers per hour. The flight was smooth and breathtaking. He did several circles around the airfield before landing.
“The feeling of freedom, the absence of vibration, this smoothness when you fly. These feelings are hard to express,” Yakovlev said.
Now he says that he has to get ready to break a new record – absolute altitude. He wants to climb 8,000 meters into the sky.
