My company mates-navigators speaking of the old days, when they were in their navigation schools and faculties, remember how they often heard the sentences (by the way, pronounced by their tutors!) like this one: "So, all you guys will try in vain to succeed in a career of an actually dead profession!"

'Navigators vs. Flight Engineers' Evgeniy Petrenko, a navigator (left); Evgeniy Banduring, a flight engineer (right). Good, 'sworn' friends.

Both of them, as the representatives of their professions, while having a moment of informal chat in the air or on the ground, often allude to this long-standing issue of reducing the Tupolev crew and jokingly dispute the precise date for the proposed 'Doomsday'. Such disputes might rapidly upgrade into the hot and hilarious squabbling (though, always lighthearted), where each side poke fun at the other, prophesing the not-long end to the opposing party.

But the real job of "breathing life into the Ministry's directives" was to be made by the local operational detachments of the Soviet Aeroflot - which is what we called those units of the single gigantic airline we only had in that period of the country's history.

And it would be here, in one of these local detachments, that an energetic head of a unit could catch on "where the winds blow to and from", and order the staff to work out concrete plans for refurbishing the current TU-154's operational practice.

Instantly, following this command all the pertinent offices would start calculating the cost of modernization, forecasting the expected soar in profits (after eliminating all unnecessary navigator staff), tailoring new flight operational procedures, or creating the training curricula and organizing classes for crews designated to pioneer this course of progress.

Regarding the latter point of program, it would not be the last role in the "special and very important" business of assigning "deserving candidates" taken by the Communist Party Committee, which was sometimes as influential in the decision making as the senior flight service management.

Over twenty years have passed since that time. There is no more Soviet Union; no longer do the powerful party's chieftains rule the managerial practice in the horde of today's Russia's airlines - the descendants of those former "Soviet Aeroflot's detachments".But there are lots of Tu-134s, Tu-154s, Il-62s, Il-76s,-86s veteran aircraft still flying domestically and internationally. And they are still being steered on their courses by the "next lost (last?!)" generation of navigators, undauntedly beating all the odds and looking forward into the XXI century.

A framed "glass nose" (in fact, it is far not the same what the "glass-cockpit" is) - a dome housing the navigator's work place in all early models of Tupolev jet liners, including the -104s, -114s, -124s, and (imagined here) -134s.

I am almost a hundred per cent certain that today there is not one TU-154 operator in Russia flying the aircraft without the navigator. Giving a final and finessing stroke to my story, I tell you I can't help laughing (though, with a great deal of sadness) remembering one episode from two years ago.

Attending a recurrency ground course in the Rostov training center, I met a flight school mate of mine, who worked for an airline based in Volgograd, Russia. He then said something that I recall, astonished me very much: his company arranged in the center, for the transition training to convert its Yak-40 and Yak-42 First Officers into... Tu-134' navigators!

In the next publications I'll try to give my opinion on "why do we have what we have".