Forty-one-year-old Nadezhda Petrukhina (
Maya Bulgakova), who was a heroic Soviet
fighter pilot during
World War II, now lives a quiet but unfulfilling ordinary life as the principal of a construction-oriented trade school. Beloved and revered by the generation that experienced the
Great Patriotic War, Nadezdha struggles to connect with the generation that followed hers, and to form a closer romantic connection to her boyfriend Pavel, a museum director. Nadezhda disapproves of her adopted daughter Tanya's choices in men, and worries that Tanya (
Zhanna Bolotova), unaware she is adopted, might discover the truth. Their relationship is tense, understated and ambiguous; when Tanya encourages her mother to quit her job and begin a new life with a husband, Nadezhda responds with a detached lecture on the importance of self-sacrifice and duty to the state, values she held dear during her military service. At the school, however, Nadezhda's students can appreciate neither the sacrifices she made during the war, nor the sacrifices she makes for them now. This tension comes to a head when she expels Bostryakov, a popular student, for shoving a female classmate and impertinence, only to have the entire student body beg for him to be allowed back. When she permits Bostryakov to return, he tells Nadezdha he despises her. Nadezdha's vivid memories of flight in her
Yakovlev Yak-9 fighter plane, tumbling through clouds, are often interspersed with reality and the moments of dull monotony, such as her daily bus commute. A visit to a local museum, where Nadezhda sees a photograph of fellow pilot Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov), who was her lover during
World War II, brings back memories of his final flight. Their planes had been flying abreast when Mitya's plane was hit by gunfire. His plane gradually descended into a crash, with Nadezhda unable to intercede, culminating in a last-ditch attempt to cause a visual disturbance in front of Mitya's crippled plane by rolling the wings of her own plane within his field of vision in hopes of jarring him to consciousness, but to no avail. Unsettled by her memories, Nadezdha proposes marriage to Pavel, but a moment later discards the idea, writing it off as "the director marrying one of his exhibits." Seized by nostalgia, Nadezhda goes to the military airfield to visit her friend Konstantin, a flight instructor. While there, she climbs aboard a
Yakovlev Yak-18 PM training plane and experiences a flush of emotions as she examines the instrument panel. Konstantin arrives, and he and his students playfully push the plane through the field with Nadezhda sitting in it. Nadezhda's happiness turns to apprehension as the aircraft nears the entrance to the hangar. At the last moment, Nadezhda starts the engine, wheels the aircraft around, and taxies out to the runway, with the astonished Konstantin and students running after her. Lifting off, she repeats the final maneuvers she had performed in her aircraft when she tried to bring Mitya back to consciousness in the last moments of their final flight together so many years ago. ==Cast==