Word: ilyushins
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Shortly after sunset one evening, a Cubana Airlines Ilyushin-18 took off from Santiago, Cuba's second largest city, bound for Havana with 91 passengers. Among the crew was Flight Engineer Angel Betancourt Cueto, who was prepared to risk his life to escape Cuba. Seventy miles west of Havana. Betancourt made his move. Locking the door that separates the flight deck from the passengers, he suddenly slugged the guard who stood just behind the pilot and copilot and ordered Captain Fernando Alvarez Perez to set a course for Miami. "From this moment," as a government communiqué later described...
...touching down on the runway at Havana's José Marti Airport, when Betancourt caught on to the trick. Angrily, he ordered Alvarez to take off again. When the pilot refused, Betancourt shot him dead and frantically tried to get the plane off the ground himself. But the Ilyushin only roared off the end of the runway and came to rest in a plowed field. Leaping out of the pilot's window, Betancourt managed to escape into the darkness...
...Finance Minister Li Hsien-nien was on hand to greet the Russian, dapper in a well-cut coat with Persian lamb collar and matching cap. The Chinese had prepared lunch, but the Russians had fore-handedly eaten on the plane, so generalities were exchanged about the weather, and the Ilyushin winged aloft a scant 50 minutes after landing...
...their cigarette factory at Wassawassa-until U.S. officials demanded its removal. Last month Sékou Touré's prestigious but overextended Air Guinée had to cease operations: only one of its four routes was paying its own way, and its Soviet Ilyushin transports were breaking down regularly, along with a few American-supplied...
...targets to the north. Barracks and PT boats, radar stations and ammo dumps caught the brunt of the aerial assault, and the bomb-line boomed ever closer to Hanoi. U.S. planes struck within 45 miles of the North Vietnamese capital, as if to challenge the half-dozen Soviet Ilyushin-28 jet bombers discovered by high-flying U.S reconnaissance planes late last month and at present sitting idly at Phucyen, just northwest of Hanoi. U.S. officials assume that the planes are Russian-piloted and represent Moscow's fulfillment-along with three antiaircraft missile sites under construction near the capital...