Morning, December 25, 1979. Almost three hundred military transport aircraft are lined up at airfields in the Middle Asia. Inside cargo cabins are combat equipment and landing troops. A signal comes in and aircraft groups, one after another, with roaring engines and clouds of dust, start into the air. It all looks more like a great relocation of people. In the next three days the intensive work does not slow down. Continuous engines roar of heavy aircraft hangs over the air fields… That’s how the picture of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan looked. In the first days of the operation almost 8,000 people, 900 items of equipment and over a thousand tons of cargo were relocated. And this was only 2% of the enormous volume of transportation performed by the Soviet military transport aviation in that war.
