It is hard not to feel a certain grisly admiration for the three drunken male flight attendants on Aeroflot flight 713 from Moscow to the Siberian town of Nizhnevartovsk who, on Monday, beat up a passenger when he tried to get a drink.
In one sweeping act of folly, they managed to re-embed in the world's consciousness three negative stereotypes about Russia which, otherwise, might have been threatened with extinction, namely: that Russian service is appallingly rude; Russian airlines are appallingly dangerous; and Russians are always appallingly drunk. I say "extinction" because lately, in Russia, shop assistants and waiters have begun smiling in a friendly way at customers, beer has begun to replace vodka as the drink of first choice, and your average Aeroflot flight from London to Moscow isn't so different from your average British Airways flight: a western aircraft, brisk service, an unappetising tray of little portions on the seat table.
The international face of Aeroflot, the only face most readers of this page are ever likely to see, has come a long way since the nadir of 1994, when a pilot invited his young son to have a shot at flying the plane during a journey from Moscow to Hong Kong. It plunged to earth, killing all 75 people on board.
The domestic face of Russian aviation, however, remains rough and ready. It was only six years ago that I flew from Moscow to Nice on an Aeroflot plane which had a glassed-over nose for a bomb-aimer to lie down in. Most of the internal routes flown by Aeroflot and its commercial rivals, the "babyflots", still use old Soviet planes whose upholstery I can still smell, even now. The big Ilyushins with a sort of woodshed space downstairs for luggage; the small twin-propeller Antonovs, deafeningly loud inside but in which, remarkably, a couple of fellow passengers managed to have sex in the toilets on the way back from Crimea; the zippy little Yak jets - (once, when I was leaving Kiev in one of these, the pilot found the runway was being repaired and took off from the grass alongside instead) - and the Tupolev-154, the donkey of the skies, virtually indestructible as long as it does not actually collide with the ground.
At what point did I begin to lose my faith in post-Soviet aviation? Was it those particularly bald tyres on the plane from Moscow to Vorkuta? Was it the time I flew from Rostov to Tbilisi in a Yak so overloaded that there were passengers standing in the aisle, and facing me were fresh eggs stacked floor to ceiling - such that were we to crash, rescuers would find me as the filling in a giant omelette? Was it when, taxiing out for takeoff from Makhachkala on the Caspian, the plane stopped because one of the engines wouldn't start and a man came out to fix it with a screwdriver, leaving us to fly on to Moscow with a smell of burning in the cabin?
Not that faith ever died completely. The aircrew always seem to rise to the extraordinary demands put on them. If I have to land on snow, I would rather it was a Russian at the controls. Someone once told me the secret of Russian civil aviation. "Good pilots," he said, "and strong undercarriage."
