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NEWSLETTER #48 - SEPTEMBER 2004 WORTH A SECOND GLANCE
THE BEST WAY TO VISIT MONGOLIA
We have previously featured a Soviet airport of neo-classical design at Lvov. On the face of it, this card is more of the same. It is actually a vertical card but the bottom is blank space so I have edited it to save space. The fact that it is old enough to feature an IL-14 is interesting enough but the odd thing is that the tail flag is not the all-red Soviet emblem but has a vertical blue/grey stripe. Now the then constituent republics of the USSR all had their own flags but these were not used by the regional divisions of Aeroflot. The clue is the airport location, Ulan Bator in Mongolia. Although to all intents and purposes a Soviet republic, the Peoples Republic of Mongolia was nominally independent. Founded in 1924 it was the destination for the 1926 first international service of the Soviet airline Dobrolet (later Aeroflot). MIAT (Mongolyn Irgeny Agaaryn Teever) was founded in 1956 with a mix of IL-14 and An-2 aircraft and opened international service to Irkutsk and Beijing using the IL-14 s as shown.
With the collapse of Soviet power , MIAT was re-invented as a national flag-carrier with western equipment and, by current standards a relatively prolific issuer of postcards. Shown opposite is a 727 with tribesmen in tradition al dress and the current Ulan Bator terminal. Newly added is a 737-800. The following airline -issue cards are known, although the status of the Tu-154 card is uncertain :-
Tu-154 MPR-85644 Ground
With a current fleet of one A310 , 3 An-24 , 1 An-26 and 1 737-800, those of current models represent an output of almost 2 cards per aircraft
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