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 paint, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs in Cyrillic, 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 a 47-tonne airliner.

A Soviet-Italian comedy in the deep Cold War

By 1973 the Soviet Union and Italy had concluded a decade of cinematic co-productions that, by Politburo standards, qualified as warm. The Italian film industry — strong, leftward-leaning, hungry for the Russian market — kept making joint films with Mosfilm. Eldar Ryazanov, then in his mid-forties and already one of the most successful comedy directors in Soviet cinema, was paired with Franco Prosperi to make a slapstick chase comedy in which a group of Italian fortune-hunters search for hidden Tsarist gold across Leningrad and Moscow.

The script called for a jet landing on a highway, and a model shot would have looked exactly like what it was. The answer came from Ulyanovsk, home of the USSR’s school of higher flight training for civil aviation. Its deputy head, Ivan Tarashchan, offered to perform the stunt himself — by most accounts he asked the Ministry of Civil Aviation for a letter authorising him to fly outside the manual, was refused, and the landings went ahead on the school’s own airfield regardless. A real Tu-134 was found.

How they actually built the shot

The location was a reserve runway at the school’s airfield in Ulyanovsk, with concrete thick enough to handle Tu-134-class loads. The set department painted over the runway markings, added lane lines, and dressed the verges with planted trees, traffic lights, house facades and Soviet newspaper kiosks. From the air at low altitude the result looked like a normal stretch of two-lane Soviet highway.

The “civilian” traffic was Tarashchan’s own condition: only passenger cars, and only pilots behind the wheel. The school mobilised every flyer who owned a car, reasoning that in an emergency pilots would react instantly and correctly. They could see, in their rearview mirrors, exactly where the jet would be and what they had to do to stay out of its path.

The shot the Italians could not believe

The shot is cut into the film as a single approach, touchdown and rollout. From the air the road looks completely ordinary. The aircraft passes over a Soviet woman pushing a perambulator. The aircraft passes between two Ladas. The aircraft touches down between the painted lane markings and rolls past the camera with its thrust reversers fully deployed, kicking up dust and propsetting.

The follow-up shots — the Tu-134 taxiing down the “highway” while cars dart beneath its wings and overtake it — were filmed on the same reserve runway, dressed even more elaborately: house facades, traffic lights, planted trees, newspaper kiosks and a kvass barrel.

The film, the aircraft, the legacy

The film opened in the Soviet Union in 1974 and sold 49.2 million tickets in its first year — making it one of the most-attended Soviet releases of the year. It was released in Italy as “Una matta, matta, matta corsa in Russia” with very modest box office, though it remains a cult favourite in both countries. The Tu-134 highway-landing sequence is, in 2026, one of the most-watched pieces of Soviet film footage on YouTube.

The runway it landed on belonged to the flight school’s airfield at Ulyanovsk, which went on training Soviet and Russian civil-aviation pilots for decades afterwards; the road dressing was struck as soon as the cameras stopped.

What Ryazanov and Prosperi produced is, in essence, one of the most spectacular practical stunts in aviation cinema history. No green screen. No miniatures. No process plates. A real twin-jet airliner landed on a real Soviet runway disguised as a Soviet highway, with real pilots driving Soviet cars across its path — six times over, until the directors had every frame they needed.

Sources: Russian-language accounts of the Ulyanovsk shoot (73online.ru; 1ul.ru); Mosfilm; Russian Wikipedia entry on the film.