Kazakhstan - a place worth to re-visit

Tomasz Kozakowski
4 sie
2 minut(y) czytania

Back in the summer of 1999, together with two of my Swiss friends I made my first spotting trip to Central Asia. As we expected to see a lot of soviet planes around, we set our radar to Kazakhstan and… we were not disappointed at all. Perhaps I should come back to that trip in another post as while sitting at home during the COVID-19 pandemic I managed to scan quite a few slides taken at that time.

Anyway – last May I was scheduled on a duty trip to Almaty and Astana and hoped to take a few shots whenever time and duties permit. I must admit that this time I was really lucky again. Few weeks before departure to Almaty I got in touch with Sergey (a well-known plane spotter from UAAA), who agreed to show me some new spotting locations around the airport. The place he showed me was absolutely amazing. I just regret that I did not take my 100-400 lens, but still the shorter 70-300 lens made the job and allowed me to take a few nice shots of departing planes. It was really cool to catch the Sunday Airlines Boeing 757-200, Kalitta Boeing 777-300 Freighter as well as rotating Pegasus Airlines Airbus A320neo. In addition to that I took also several planes through the window from the domestic terminal before my departure to Astana – out of which I especially liked the Pilatus PC-12 of Dala Air.

Spotting in Astana was a kind of difficult as during my visit the runway remained close for some works from 10:00am to 06:00pm. However, as part of my duties included airport visit, I was permitted to take just a few shots at the ramp. Even though my time on the airside was limited, I was lucky to catch a newly delivered Let 410NG of the Kazakhstan Ministry for Emergency Situations as well as Qazaq Air Dash 8-Q400 among others. What accelerated the bit of my heart was an abandoned Antonov 24 used for fire training as there are not many birds of that type flying worldwide these days.