This plane was originally delivered to MEA in May 1997 as F-OHMP before flying for many years with Onur Air as TC-OAE. It started life in Russia from March 2012 with the various incarnations of Kolavia/TUI Russia/Metrojet but was tragically lost over the Sinai Desert on 31st October 2015 with the loss of all 224 people on board.

Ural's colours looked good on any of the types it adorned and the Il-86 is no exception. Aircraft manufactured 11.91, transferred from Aeroflot to Sibir 11.94 then Ural 11.04; scrapped at Yekaterinburg 4.13

The sort of result that makes the difficulties of visiting Russia to shoot aircraft all seem worthwhile

Taken just before grabbing the slide camera, this smart 154 was donated by the Russian Government to the Kyrgyz Government in January 2007. It was wfu by 2013 at Manas airport (which serves the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek), and was still stored there by 2020.

The old Azal colours always looked very smart, as seen on this Tu-154, which was wfu by 2003 and broken up at Baku in late 2009

Preserved on display outside the DME terminal but later deliberately cut up.

Ilyushin Il-18D of the Domodedovo Civil Aviation Production Association wearing an early scheme with red fin.

This terrific propliner was unfortunately demolished in 2006.

This long-time Armenian IL-86 appeared with Armavia titles in 2005. Soon after this shot it was wfu at Voronezh and intriguingly the nose was cut off and transported to an armaments test range to be used in a experiment on 7.10.15. This imitated the shoot-down of flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014, a SAM missile similar to that suspected to have brought down the Malaysian 777 being fired at the nose section