Tanay Airfield Aviation Museum

The Tanay Airfield aviation museum is a free open-air display of military aircraft, helicopters and armoured vehicles in Zhuravlyovo, Promyshlennovsky District, Kemerovo Oblast. The collection stands on the grounds of the Tanay sports airfield, next to the Novosibirsk – Leninsk-Kuznetsky – Kemerovo highway, and can be seen from the road.

History

Tanay Airfield was built in the second half of the 2000s by the Russian Parachute Sports Federation on the initiative of its president Andrei Barabash and opened in 2009. It has grown into one of the largest drop zones east of the Urals, with more than 20,000 jumps a year and Russian national and international skydiving competitions. The aviation museum on the airfield has been open since 2020, and admission is free.

When the complex opened, a memorial stele was put up to the pilots who died in the Great Patriotic War: it is engraved with the names of Siberian air heroes, with an I-16 fighter standing beside it. A short alley of glory leads from the stele.

What to see at Tanay Airfield

The exhibits stand in the open, so a visit is a walk from one machine to the next. Many aircraft rest on supports, because the equipment that keeps them on their landing gear is removed when they are handed over to a museum. The collection includes:

• Mi-1, Mi-2 and Mi-8 helicopters and the Mi-24 attack helicopter;
• Yak-18 and Yak-52 trainers and the An-2 utility biplane;
• a MiG-23 fighter and an I-16 fighter designed by Nikolai Polikarpov and built from 1934 to 1942;
• a T-34 medium tank, a BRDM-2 armoured car, an armoured personnel carrier and an M-80 combat vehicle;
• a BM-13 Katyusha rocket launcher on a ZIS-6 chassis, a 45 mm anti-tank gun and a 76 mm ZiS-3 divisional gun.

Children and adults alike enjoy it: the machines can be seen up close, and in good weather planes with skydivers circle over the field.

Getting there

The airfield lies on the Novosibirsk – Leninsk-Kuznetsky highway near Zhuravlyovo. From Kemerovo it is about 115 km via Promyshlennaya, roughly an hour and a half by car; buses run from Kemerovo bus station to Vaganovo and take from 2 hours 40 minutes. From Novosibirsk it is 155–160 km via Plotnikovo, about two and a half hours. A navigator search for "Tanay" sometimes leads to offices in Kemerovo, so pick the airfield on the map: it has its own marker on Yandex and Google Maps.

Good to know

The airfield has the Aerodrom Tanay hotel with rooms of several classes and separate cottages; meals are paid for separately. Tandem jumps with an instructor are offered from 3,000–4,000 m out of an L-410 aircraft. The Tanay ski resort on Mount Slizun is nearby, so the museum is easy to combine with a stay in the area. Opening hours of the display are not given in public sources.