Eli Lilly chartered one back in the early 2000’s to move some equipment to San Juan. I got an up close and personal on it.
Great looking airplane, but a piece of crap up close. Threadbare tires, busted rivets, pilot seats mounted on wooden blocks, fans screwed into the cockpit dash, due to inop air conditioning, etc.
The American Trans Air mechs worked on it for free, just to have it in their logbooks. Was on the ground, broke, at IND for almost 3 weeks.
Not early 2000’s, more like late 90’s, now that I think about it.
At the time, the aircraft was well maintained and in pretty good shape but the engineering was crude and the build quality rough compared to , say, a C-5 Galaxy.
The Russian pilots were a trip . They were some of the first to get out unsupervised as “civilians” world wide and lets just say that they did not exactly conform to the FAA ideal for rules following commercial pilots. In fact, they were pretty dismissive of much of any kind of rules at all , for that matter.
Russian aviation is a very different thing from what we are used to here in the states.