#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Before that, aircraft landed on water or on ice: on Dolgoye lake, Rybnaya and Norilskaya rivers. For construction, Aerodromstroy was created, where 500 prisoners were sent to permanent work.
In July 1946, the Nadezhda runway was accepted for temporary operation: the airfield was under construction and time accepted aircraft at the same. And on June 1, 1950, it was transferred from the NKVD to the Krasnoyarsk Civil Air Fleet Directorate.
The Krasnoyarsk-Norilsk route was not easy: a six-hour flight on small unheated airplanes without a single landing.
At that time, the aircraft fleet consisted of eleven Li-2; later, Nadezhda also received Po-2, Il-12 and Il-14.
In severe snowstorms, the airport did not work for a week or longer. In 1950-1951, when landing at Nadezhda, there were two Li-2 plane crashes with victims.
The village at the airfield was small; it was clearly not designed to accommodate the entire personnel of the air garrison. At first, drinking water was delivered in barrels, but there was a school and even a small house of culture.
Since 1953, the regular passenger flights to Norilsk appeared (before that all flights were only official): 18 thousand passengers a year. Nadezhda remained the main passenger airport.
By 1961, the planes were flying in 13 directions, including Adler, Simferopol and Mineralnye Vody.
In 1965, the Nadezhda airport was closed in connection with the commissioning of the new airport Alykel (it was built for the arrival of Nikita Hrushchev). The personnel of the squadron relocated there. And on the site of the old airfield, a plant of the same name was built.
In the last issue of the History Spot photo project, we told about the fact that in the 1940s there were only 36 telephone points in Norilsk.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
