Documentary : Flying Unfriendly Skies of Abkhazia : Forget check-ins, flight attendants or ground crew. At Sukhumi, getting aboard is a harrowing free-for-all.

There is something unsettling about flying with a man not only sitting on the table in front of the seat but cradling four loaded semiautomatic rifles on his lap. Nor does it help to see across the aisle another passenger cleaning his fingernails with the pin of a live hand grenade.

From the start, nothing was quite normal about catching a flight out of Sukhumi. The lush seafront city is the capital of the war-ravaged Georgian autonomous republic of Abkhazia, lying on the front line of chaotic efforts by Georgian troops to stamp out a Russian-backed, ethnic Abkhaz rebellion.

Visiting Georgia to report on the troubled former Soviet republic, I spent the night in Sukhumi and was heading back to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

Disorder was quickly apparent as we limped up to the airport in a dilapidated Moskvich car, taken by my three Georgian companions from an Abkhazian household during the eight months of fighting. An armored vehicle blocked our way to the airport apron. A dozen other vehicles had managed to get through and were clustered on the tarmac, ready to race for the only daily plane to Tbilisi.

Avoiding the dreary departure hall, I waited out of the rain under the colonnade of the crumbling terminal building. Six months earlier, it had been a pleasant neoclassical structure among the cypresses and the palm trees, welcoming tourists to this former jewel of the Black Sea coast. It now seemed like a scene from a film about post-nuclear chaos.

Passengers on a plane that had just arrived from Moscow dragged their baggage across the cracked tarmac toward me. The terminal building doors were locked, but the windows had been knocked out. One by one, the new arrivals clambered through the broken window of the door, across the main hall and out another window to the battered remains of a parking lot.

The hall’s smooth plaster dome was pocked by bullet holes. A gang of militiamen sat on planks around a bonfire, swilling vodka and insulting strangers. Snatches of song rolled down from a drunken party upstairs.

Everyone watched and waited. Under the wings of the plane from Moscow, local people and what may have been a ground crew moved in to start draining fuel into cans to heat their homes. Unkempt dogs, thrown into the street by owners no longer able to afford pets, wandered by in the misty rain, sniffing for food in the debris and the advancing subtropical vegetation.

Suddenly, our Tupolev 154, arriving from Tbilisi, landed in a shower of spray, taxied past the blown-up wreckage of one plane--Sukhumi airport is legendary for having suffered an air raid by an Abkhaz rebel in a hang glider--and around another airliner resting on three big jacks. No ground crew came out to guide the plane as it rolled to a stop.

The anxious would-be passengers quickly made their move. With roads and railways blocked by bandits and rebels, the flight is the safest route from Sukhumi to Tbilisi, and there is usually only one flight a day because of the national shortage of airplane fuel. Hundreds of soldiers, women, children and a dozen trucks, buses, cars and jeeps surged toward the plane, unhindered by such amenities as tickets, check-ins, seat numbering or flight attendants.

The bemused pilot in his Soviet-era uniform got out to watch this exercise in anarchy. Leading the charge were the soldiers, an intimidating, war-scarred bunch, armed to the teeth, some with long beards like Orthodox monks, others with piratical bandannas around their heads. Despite their rough appearance, many turned out to be former students of economics, doctors or even former archeologists. Hard-bitten individualists to a man, there was no question of giving or obeying any orders.

“Discipline! Discipline!” shouted a 74-year-old veteran, once a squad of soldiers had managed to roll a set of steps through the crowd up to the fuselage of the plane. “If we have no discipline, we will lose the war!”

Nobody listened as the old man weakly waved his revolver in the air, although there was relative quiet as several thin steel coffins bearing war dead appeared. A drunken policeman fired a slow salute as they were passed hand over head into the plane.

After that, neither screams nor tears made any difference as we were crushed together with our luggage on the one battered stairway. Furious militiamen could roar and fire whole magazines of bullets into the air, but nobody paid attention.

Hulking soldiers blocked the main way with rifles, but the nimble climbed over the side of the gangway behind them into the plane. The soldier barring my passage would alternately shove me down and then, in odd but charming acts of kindness, gently push my dislodged glasses back up my nose.

I was getting nowhere when I saw a metal ladder being put up for the pilot to climb back into the cockpit. I wrenched my body and luggage out of the crowd, threw myself over the boarding steps and ran for it. Inside the stinking plane, miraculously, an empty seat. Nothing else seemed to matter as the plane filled as full as a Cairo bus, while outside, dozens of mournful-looking people were left on the tarmac.

Still nobody took charge, and the crew members seemed to have locked themselves in the cockpit. Finally, the pilot was persuaded to survey the bizarre scene. A crewman reported that there were 230 people on the 170-seat plane. “ Normalno, “ said the captain, “everything normal.” He sent a radio engineer to herd people down the aisle to the rear to help balance the plane for takeoff and started the engines.

Shuddering into the air in the strong, silent Soviet-built plane was a blessed relief. I buried myself in a novel, trying to ignore the loaded guns all around, the boisterous soldiers playing with their hand grenades and the discomfort of having my legs wrapped around looted television tubes. Did the Georgian doctor-turned-militiaman crushed up beside me miss the old certainties and safety of the Soviet Union? Apparently not. “War is war,” he said. “And look, the plane still flies.”