In the body of the letter

- That's not all! I can go even lower! Look...

The noise of the blades overhead prevented me from hearing the pilot’s words. I rather guessed the meaning of what was said. A border helicopter was hovering over a Lithuanian village, the tops of the vegetable gardens fell and stretched towards the Soviet-Polish border, and the laundry on the arched ropes banged parallel to the ground.

The pilot pressed the lever away from himself, and our Mi-8 sank even lower. From the porthole I saw how from one of the courtyards some white lumps were thrown by the wind over the fence and scattered along the street - I did not immediately realize that they were chickens. A grandmother came out of the house and shook her fist at our helicopter.

It was more than twenty years ago - a friend and I were writing a report about border guard pilots guarding the borders of a country that had only a short time left to live.

A few years later I was driving through the same Lithuanian village in a car I bought in Germany. Her radiator was leaking, and I alternately filled its belly with German, Polish, and then Lithuanian water. It is possible that the same old woman whose chickens stopped laying eggs after the stress of the helicopter brought me a bucket of water.

Well, then new borders appeared, and you had to have a visa to go to your friends in Kaliningrad by car. And without a visa - only by plane.

It was probably then that I first thought that cars and aviation had a lot in common.

Dmitry Gronsky, editor-in-chief

Introduction – Cars – Kommersant