The end of the 1940s. Test pilot Aleksei Kolchin was commissioned for the first time to fly the first Soviet jet fighter. The tests are successful, but it is necessary to improve the aircraft. When performing a test flight, Kolchin dies, his last words are recorded on tape. Having studied them, Kolchin's friend Sergei Sharov makes a new attempt and completes the test of the aircraft.

A new shipyard director arrives in the city. New orders began at the factory, but, unfortunately, the new leader had flaws: there was something unusually tough, callous in his attitude to people ...

On the outskirts of the provincial town, Yevdokim and Yevdokiya live, raising foster children. Yevdokim works at a factory, Yevdokiya is a housewife. The family seems to be safe and happy: the only trouble is that Yevdokiya cannot forget the love of her youth. This Yevdokim cannot stand and offers Yevdokiya freedom, while he will remain with the children. But all these contradictions are drowned in mutual love for children and for each other.

A group of young people comes to a Siberian construction site. They form a brigade, one of their tasks being cutting of a track for a power line. Different reasons made these people go to taiga and become pathfinders. One of them, a former taxi-driver Leonid (A.Kuznetsov) went to earn lots of money, Rimma (A.Zavialova) from the undivided love, the yesterdays schoolboy Constantine to find romantic appeal and adventures, and Vladimir (N.Dovzhenko) attempting to escape his shadowy past. Far away from the city fuss, in severe labor conditions and unsettled way of life, relations of these absolutely unknown to each other people gradually resume the normal course. Here many of them experience revaluation of values, others even find their love.