RUSSIAN PILOT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22694, 5 April 1937, Page 9

RUSSIAN PILOT

2,000,000 FLYING MILES )VORK FOR DUTCH AIR LINE AMSTERDAM, March 27 Ivan Smirnoff smiled more broadly thaai ever as he stepped down from a K.Ii..M. aeroplane arriving from Paris, for lie had just completed 3,000,000 ' kilometres —almost 2,000,000 miles—of flying for K.L.M. in 15,000 flying hours. Several British pilots have flown more than 1,000,000 miles, but a world's record is claimed for Smirnoff. Apart front the 3,000,000 kilometres he had had seven years of flying before joining K.L.M., first as a Russian war pilot, then in Eng land, Belgium, and France. "My most exciting flight," Smirnoff said in an interview, "was my first solo flight, in 19J/J, when I was a learner in the llussian Army. I had an old machine with an engine capable of doing 40 miles an hour, and I felt like a king. It was the best minute of my 15,000 flying lifc-urs when I left the ground—alone. "My worst liotf.r was in 1923, flying to London with tiiree passengers in a single-motor aeroplane. "The engine stopped and I had to put the machine A'own on. Goodwin Sands. The first hour on the sand-bank was not so bad, then the tide .began to rise and flooded higheir and higher. But at the last moment a fisherman sighted us and came to the rescue." Next week Smirnoff \will go on the Batavia run.