Flight from Hell by Vitali Vitaliev

A civilian to the core of my bones, I have always been puzzled by the militaria. The only bad mark I got at my Soviet University was in Military Tactics - a compulsory discipline for every high-school student in the jingoistic and paranoid USSR. I remember that among the things we studied were composition and equipment of NATO armies - our potential enemies, the British Army being one of them. Not even in my wildest dreams could I imagine that twenty odd years later I would be given a chance not only to mix with British servicemen - and women, as political correctness requires us to say these days - better known as squaddies, but also to fly onboard a real RAF jet.

It was the most curious journey I have had in my entire, highly peripatetic, life.

The adventure started in Swindon, Wiltshire, where I was waiting for a bus to take me to RAF Brize Norton airport for a Tristar military flight to Mount Pleasant - the quickest - if not the cheapest - way to get to the Falklands. With the impending scrapping or, as I would call it "Pinocheting" of the only commercial flight from London via Chile, this is soon going to be the only way...

The bus was late, and I realised with horror that I would be unable to "report for check-in" by "the latest reporting time", specified in strict "Reporting Instructions JSTC/R2/30", attached to my ticket. Shifting from one foot to the other, I was nervously - for an umpteenth time, checking the availability of an overnight bag in my cabin luggage: the same Reporting Instructions demanded that every passenger had an overnight bag handy - in case our Tristar gets suddenly diverted to bomb Iraq, or so I thought. The overnighter was there, but the bus wasn't.

The delay did not seem to worry my fellow-travellers - a large group of vociferous crew-cut youngsters communicating with each other with the help of one f-word only, probably the servicemen (sorry, but there were no women among them), and a handful of confused and dishevelled civilians like myself.

Having finally received my RAF boarding pass: "rank - none", I wandered aimlessly around the airport lounge, where only two outlets were open - a tiny newsagent, with an impressive choice of soft-porn magazines, and a note-exchange machine - "Insert £20 Queen's face up and last". They were calling out passengers by names in alphabetical order, and for the first time in my life I rejoiced at having a name starting with "V" which allowed me to have three additional fags before a strictly non-smoking flight.

Twenty minutes after the take-off, plastic cups of "RAF Fruit Juice" were served, or rather distributed, by muscular stone-faced stewards, who all seemed to stick assiduously to some mysterious no-smiling-under-any-circumstances military regulations. Just like the stewards' faces, the drink was frozen stiff. It melted and became drinkable by next morning, when, to my great relief, I discovered in a seat-pocket in front of me an indispensable "NATO Stock Number 8105-99-130-2180" air sickness bag. Next to this thoroughly encoded bag, there was a copy of the RAF in-flight monthly, ingeniously entitled "Inflight". Compared to it, a glossy safety leaflet in the same seat-pocket read - and looked - like ‘Hello’ magazine.

Soon, we started our descent on Ascension Island, a barren volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic, for a refuelling stop and were duly instructed "on de-planing procedures" over the intercom.

On RAF Ascension, I hesitated in front of a plywood shed with a frightening sign "Terminal Drinks Kiosk" before plunging into Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders", a 1374-page-thick brick of a paperback, which could itself easily prove terminal, if dropped onto your head from a ground-floor window, or in a more unlikely case of being read to end.

The second leg of the flight was not that different from the first one. Same juice, chips and stale rolls with unidentifiable (probably classified) filling were served - sorry, distributed - by a different, yet equally unsmiling, cabin crew. Same peremptory announcements forbidding any movement around the cabin during meal times were made at regular intervals. Same choice of four old videos camouflaged as "flight entertainment" was offered. It was hard to believe that the cost of an average ticket to the Falklands was almost twice as high as that of a Qantas flight from London to Melbourne.

"Didn't you know that in their flight documents, the military refer to civilian passengers as SLF - self-loading freight?" a facetious Falkland Islands official, who met me at Mount Pleasant, said as we were waiting for my luggage to arrive.

"You must be joking," I wanted to say, but choked on my words as I looked at the moving conveyer and spotted my long-awaited weather-beaten backpack. The word "Civilian" was printed in large letters on a cardboard tag, tied to its handle.