Ali Kefford recently spent a few days with the crew of HMS Southampton in the Crimea. Here's her tale of an adventurous journey...

ON REFLECTION, I think it was the smell of burning as we flew over the mountains that scared me the most.

But the strong odour - suggesting all might not be well with the plane's engines - was really just the tip of the iceberg.

For, from the moment I clapped eyes on the ancient Russian jet sitting on the runway in the sleet, my heart rate doubled.

I had just arrived in Bulgaria to cover HMS Southampton's Remembrance Day service in Varna.

Reaching the Black Sea port involved taking an hour-long internal flit over the mountains.

This flight was the last leg of a long day of travelling, which had kicked off with a horrendously early start.

I was awoken at 3.45am by an insomniac friend playing her alarm clock (a raucous cock-a-doodle-doo noise) down the phone.

All this had left me vaguely traumatised for hours and certainly in no fit state to receive the first hint of what lay ahead while picking up my tickets at Heathrow.

For when I asked what operator ran the internal flights in Bulgaria the entire row of BA staff erupted into giggles.

I laughed too but the noise I made was strained and nervous - a bit like the one Dawn French makes in the Vicar of Dibley when she gets herself into a spot of bother with the parish council.

The BA staff explained how the Bulgarian air company had recently gone bust and they really didn't have a clue who was providing the service now. Even the naval photographer Sean Clee, who was also flying out, seemed a little spooked by it all - and this was a tough Royal Navy-type who could obviously look after himself.

The flight to Sofia with BA (beautiful smiley attendants with perfect lipstick/pilot with plummy accent/extremely edible food) was a dream. Which is why the prospect of stepping onto a Yakovlev 40 became even more terrifying than it would have been anyway. The Yakovlev 40 - for those of you who may not be intimately acquainted with this type of jet - was built in Russia sometime during the last century (fairly near the beginning?)

It's absolutely tiny, a sort of Lilliputian plane with 30 teeny seats and a small rack of suitcases.

Which made checking in Sean's photographic equipment a right laugh. He had excess baggage aplenty and the airport staff's eyes nearly popped out as they worked out whether or not there was room for all his lenses and passengers too.

So, back to the runway, where we trooped onto the Yakovlev 40 through an Alice in Wonderland-sized door at the back of the plane.

Obviously no one was allocated a particular seat and I ended up wedged against a businessman who was reading a story about Kylie Minogue in a Bulgarian newspaper.

It would appear the country is certainly not immune to the considerable charms of the diminutive Australian songstress as the article took up three pages.

As we taxied towards the runway there was some sort of safety announcement and I looked above for any sign of oxygen masks.

Of course there weren't any.

Silly me.

But then the racket in front demanded the attention of the entire cabin. Because, however many times the businessman sitting next to the cockpit door tried to bang it shut, it just immediately sprang open again.

In the end the man gave up and sat with his foot wedged against it to keep it closed.

Oblivious to all this, the pilot performed what seemed like a handbrake turn onto the runway and soon we were airborne and invited to unfasten our seatbelts (a kind offer I somehow felt compelled to decline).

A mobile phone went off and I was hugely relieved the businessman it belonged to turned it off rather than answering the call.

Meanwhile the passenger sitting by the cockpit opened the door and started chatting with the pilot.

He was a large man who spilled out of his cramped seat and looked as though he would never make it down the aisle without getting wedged several times.

Looking out of the window we skimmed past mountains.

It seemed wild and beautiful - though not perhaps best viewed from a plane that smelt of burning.

LA Clee and I looked at each other.

"Blimey," he said.

The rest of the flight was fairly uneventful, well except for my visit to the lavatory.

For some reason I rashly assumed that you could just open the door and walk in.

Wrong.

First you had to grab the attention of the flight attendant so he could remove the four suitcases that were being stored there.

After that I held my breath until we landed at Varna airport and only just stopped short of kissing the ground.

It's at times like this that you need the support of your boss.

And, in this respect deputy editor Dave King, came up trumps as always.

Just before the return flight two days later I called him to check they'd received all the photographs they wanted.

"If you don't hear from me again there's been a bit of a hitch with the internal flight," I explained.

"You'll be fine," came the breezy reply from Southampton.

"But, if you do make an emergency landing, would you make sure you get lots of quotes and file the story immediately."

Ha! Ha! Ha!

But the best line came from our defence attach in Bulgaria.

Based in Varna, he knew all about the internal flights - but had taken them so many times he'd become almost blas about the whole experience.

"You're lucky," he said, chortling merrily into his coffee, following the remembrance service.

"Last week the plane overshot the runway, took out six land lights and ended up in a field."