Heard “…16r Line up and wait”
Threw me for a loop.
Thought people might like to know this is the new “position and hold”
Yup, been in use around the world for years.
Next thing you know we will be converting to metric system to catch up with the rest of the world. 
Russia and China use 100% metric in aviation, at least you don’t have to buy any new gauges to fly in Europe!
Flying into Russia was always interesting. I always copied the cruise altitude conversion chart out of the Jepp manual before the trip. The pertinent altitudes for an approach were converted by Jeppesen and printed on the approach chart. They use QFE too, which means your altimeter reads 0 on the ground. You made that change about 3 or 4 thousand feet AGL. We had a couple of airports that were a bit higher than our Kollsman windows would wind. Luckily you could get a GNH altimeter setting from them. The controller have all the conversions in front of them too, although you had to be careful using those.
We had a trip into Krasnodar once, the weather was something like 400 ft. broken/ 8 Km visibility with a good ILS. Tops were only about 800 feet. Typical cold weather. We got the QFE setting from the controller, converted the millimeters to inches and got it set up. The controller then offered it in inches, woohoo. The only problem it was not quite the same as our conversion. The navigator asked him about it in Russian and got the same answer. The Turkish co-pilot just about panicked and wanted to divert. I told him to calm down, the mm was probably GQE and the inches QNH, the airport was close to sea level and the difference in the settings was about 50 feet. With a good ILS and weather 200 feet above minimums lets see which one is right. I set my altimeter to the QFE mm conversion and he set his to the QNH inches setting. We landed and sure enough mine said 0 and his had the airport elevation.
Radar procedures are different too, they give you a 90 degree intercept and it was up to you to figure out when to turn, no specific approach clearance is given either. They figure “what else would you be doing at 400 meters anyway”.
Great story! Very interesting. Int’l flying (especially those who fly for other than 121 type major carriers into the mainstream airports) must have hell for flight planning! All of the countries that probably don’t publish as much info as could be published.
I know you probably weren’t using VFR charts, but I wonder if the actual field elevation is printed on them, or for that matter was it printed on the IFR charts?
Yes, the charts for Krasnodar have all the same information as Peoria plus the metric conversions. The Russians, even back in the days of the USSR, had all the information and did selectively publish it. But if you had permission to fly somewhere you got all the goodies. We did another trip into a smallish airport in the Ukraine. We got permission after submitting all the required stuff. I never did find out anything about the airport until we had gone to Moscow and picked up the navigator. He had been assigned the trip when we first applied, he checked on the aircraft type, did all the calculations, then and only then, was permission granted.
Had we wanted to fly a 747 into a 4000 ft. grass strip they would have denied us.
The funny thing was the Jepp charts we got with our normal subscription were good but the enroute charts had a lot of blank areas. Those blank areas were off the pre-approved international routes and required a navigator. The navigator would come aboard with Jepp enroute charts that were complete. The Russians gave all the info to Jepp with the understanding they would not publish it for anybody outside of Aeroflot.
The Russian approach charts however were nice copies of hand drawn procedures, luckily pretty much in the same format as Jeppesen except in Russian. You could decipher them only because of the format.
Flying there was interesting, but not bad once you got used to the differences. I haven’t been there in about 17 years so I don’t know what has changed.
This has already been discussed…