Aeroflot history: a timeline since 1923

Published

2026-10-06

Updated

2026-10-06

Facts checked

2026-10-05

Until 1991 Aeroflot was not an airline in the usual sense: the name covered the whole of Soviet civil aviation. That is the scale behind its record: Guinness World Records lists the Aeroflot of 1990, with 139 million passengers, as the largest airline ever. The story begins in 1923. Soviet civil aviation counts 9 February of that year as its birthday, and today's Aeroflot traces its lineage to the Dobrolet joint-stock company, founded on 17 March (Aeroflot). The name itself dates from 1932. After 1991 it passed to one company among hundreds, and the numbers changed with it: in 2024 the Aeroflot group carried 55.3 million passengers.

How did Aeroflot begin?

The first Soviet international air route is older than the Aeroflot name. Deruluft, a joint Russian-German company founded in November 1921, opened the Moscow - Königsberg line on 1 May 1922. Regular domestic service began on 15 July 1923, when pilot Ya. N. Moiseyev opened the first line, Moscow - Nizhny Novgorod: 420 km in two and a half hours, in a Junkers F 13 that seated four passengers. In its first season the line carried 229 people.

The directorate and the name both date from 1932. On 25 February the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet was created, and on 26 March, according to Aeroflot's chronicle, the fleet received its short name, Aeroflot; the company's own history page puts both events on 25 February. Traffic was growing all the while, from 9,000 passengers in 1928 to 410,000 in 1940, by which time the network, on the statistics office's figures, had reached 146,000 km, 144,000 km of it inside the USSR.

War and the piston years

During the war, by Aeroflot's own count, civil aviators flew more than 1.5 million combat sorties and carried about 1.6 million people. New aircraft followed the peace: the Il-12 carried its first passengers on 1 June 1947, and the An-2 joined the fleet in 1948. By 1950 Aeroflot was carrying 1.5 million passengers a year.

Jets and the world

Aeroflot's jet age began on 15 September 1956, when a Tu-104 opened scheduled service from Moscow to Omsk and Irkutsk; on 12 October it flew to Prague. That decade is the subject of Aeroflot in the 1950s. The 1960s changed the airport, the institution and the route map. From 1 June 1960 Sheremetyevo was Moscow's international airport, and that year Aeroflot carried 16 million passengers. On 27 July 1964 the Main Directorate became the USSR Ministry of Civil Aviation. Then came the long routes: an air agreement with the United States was signed on 4 November 1966, Tokyo followed in 1967 and New York on 15 July 1968.

The largest airline in the world

The USSR joined the International Civil Aviation Organization in two steps: it deposited its notification on 15 October 1970, and membership took effect on 14 November. Traffic kept growing through those years, from 71.4 million passengers in 1970 to 100.9 million in 1976. It did not stay above 100 million at first: in 1977 the figure fell to 92.9 million, and it passed 100 million again only in 1979, with 101.9 million.

On 6 May 1980 Moscow opened the international terminal Sheremetyevo-2, and Aeroflot was named general carrier for participants in the Moscow Olympics. A 1983 CIA assessment shows how large the airline had become: citing ICAO figures, it counted 108 million passengers in 1982, 97 per cent of them domestic, with flights to 94 countries and to more than 3,600 cities and towns in the USSR (CIA). Estimates of Aeroflot's share of world air transport differed: about a seventh of the total by Aeroflot's own account, a quarter of the world's passenger-kilometres by the CIA's. In 1989 Aeroflot joined IATA. In 1990, according to Guinness, it had 600,000 employees, more than the top 18 US airlines put together, and 20,000 pilots.

After 1991

After the Soviet Union broke up, Aeroflot became one of several hundred airlines and civil aviation enterprises. By Government Resolution No. 527 of 28 July 1992 the association Aeroflot - Soviet Airlines became a joint-stock company, Aeroflot - Russian International Airlines, with a controlling stake held by the state for up to three years. The fleet changed too: the first foreign-built aircraft, leased Airbus A310-300s, arrived in 1992, and Boeing 767-300ERs followed two years later. The new company was a fraction of the old system: it carried 3.8 million passengers in 1996 and passed 5 million for the first time in 2000. In June 2000 the shareholders voted to rename it Aeroflot - Russian Airlines.

On 14 April 2006 Aeroflot became the tenth member of the SkyTeam alliance. Vitaly Savelyev, elected chief executive on 26 March 2009, took office on 10 April. The fleet went on changing: the last Tu-154Ms left by 2010, and Sukhoi Superjet 100s began arriving in June 2011. From 8 March 2022 Aeroflot suspended all foreign flights except those to Minsk, and on 27 April SkyTeam and Aeroflot agreed to suspend the airline's membership temporarily. In 2024 the Aeroflot group carried 55.3 million passengers, 16.8 per cent more than in 2023: 42.6 million on domestic routes and 12.7 million on international ones (TASS).

Timeline

Fly an airline of 1965

• Era: Jet Boom, 1965
• Base: Moscow, SVO
• In the catalog: Ilyushin Il-18, from 1959

Start in 1965

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