In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road.

In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road. Not a real road for cars. A road-coloured runway, marked up with traffic signs, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs, all of it laid down across a reserve runway at the airfield of the city's civil-aviation flight school. Then they got the deputy head of the school, Ivan Tarashchan, to land a Tupolev Tu-134 jetliner on it at full landing speed, in a straight line.

The scene appears in the 1974 film "Невероятные приключения итальянцев в России" — "Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia" — directed by Eldar Ryazanov and Franco Prosperi. It plays as a chase gag, with the jetliner improbably descending onto a crowded motorway. Nothing in the scene is CGI. Nothing is rear-projected. The jet is a real Tu-134. The road is a real, full-length, jet-rated runway disguised by the film's art department to look like an ordinary Soviet highway. And every "civilian" car on it is being driven by a pilot who has spent the morning being briefed on exactly how not to get hit by the 47-tonne airliner.

t.me/RussianBaZa