1991-2000: how one Aeroflot became hundreds of airlines

Published

2026-10-27

Updated

2026-10-27

Facts checked

2026-10-26

Until 1991, Aeroflot was not an airline but the whole of Soviet civil aviation: in 1990 it carried 139 million passengers, and Guinness World Records lists it as the largest airline of all time. The Soviet breakup split it into several hundred airlines and enterprises. By 2000 air travel in Russia had fallen from 90.8 million passengers to 23 million, and the company that kept the name, now flying Western jets, carried more than 5 million for the first time.

When Aeroflot was the whole of Soviet aviation

To understand what broke, it helps to see how the old machine worked. John Strong of the Harvard Institute for International Development, writing for a Transportation Research Board workshop in 1993, described Aeroflot as a single vertically integrated organisation that ran air traffic control, the airports, the airline itself and the regulation of all three (Strong, 1993). Its regions were not separate airlines. Each was an operating base, with no marketing or commercial functions to speak of. Fuel was subsidised even more heavily than bread, and Aeroflot paid less than 5 percent of the world price for jet fuel.

The scale was enormous. In 1990, the last full year of the Soviet Union, Aeroflot employed 600,000 people and 20,000 pilots and carried 139 million passengers (Guinness World Records). Rosstat's figure for Russia alone that year is 90.8 million passengers: 86.4 million on domestic routes and 4.4 million on international ones (Rosstat).

In June 1991 a production and commercial association called Aeroflot Soviet Airlines was formed (Aeroflot chronicle). The same year saw the end of Pan Am: its last revenue flight landed in Miami on 4 December 1991, a story told in Why Pan Am failed. Aeroflot did not disappear in the same way. It came apart.

From operating bases to airlines

Aeroflot's own chronicle puts it plainly: after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Russia's declaration of sovereignty, Aeroflot became "one of several hundred airlines and production associations of civil aviation". The company's history page adds that in 1991 the former Soviet republics and the regions of Russia set up airlines of their own (Aeroflot history).

The new airlines were built from the old bases. Strong found that the former operating bases had become de facto integrated aviation conglomerates "with captive airports, airlines, and ATC". Alongside them came start-ups that leased aircraft from Western lessors, from Eastern Europe or from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. By mid-1992, according to an estimate he cites, 213 airlines were providing scheduled service.

Krasnoyarsk Airlines, which called itself KrasAir, shows what such a conglomerate looked like by the end of the decade. In 2001 it was an open joint-stock company whose structure included Krasnoyarsk airport; it described itself as an enterprise with a 50-year history, flew 44 aircraft and served 50 cities in Russia and the former Soviet republics plus the largest cities of 20 countries (KrasAir). In November 1998, by its own account among the first Russian airlines to do so, it flew a commercial cargo flight over the North Pole, from Krasnoyarsk via Khatanga to Churchill in Canada.

Not every new airline was that solid. In 1996 the business daily Kommersant wrote that the largest companies had grown out of the former combined flight detachments of Aeroflot, while others had appeared from nothing (Kommersant, 1996). With no common certification rules in the early 1990s, it added, most of the newly founded airlines existed only on paper, without staff, aircraft or money, and lived by acting as middlemen. Under the single Aeroflot there had been no certification of airlines at all. In 1993 the Department of Air Transport drew up a manual for certifying operators, and by 1996 the Federal Aviation Service was issuing operator certificates valid for two years on domestic routes and one year on international ones.

Counting the babyflots

The new carriers acquired a nickname. In November 1996 the American radio network NPR ran a segment called "Baby Flots" about the "some 400 smaller airlines that have evolved from the original Soviet Aeroflot" (NPR). One of them was KazAir, Kazakhstan's share of the old Aeroflot.

Nobody counted them the same way, because people counted different things. A flight safety commission of the Interstate Aviation Committee put the number of independent aircraft operators at more than 550 by the start of 1995, and named the lack of effective oversight of them as the main factor that had worsened flight safety (Kommersant-Vlast, 1995). Writing in 2006, Kommersant called 1996 the peak year, when 389 carriers had been formed on the wreckage of the single Soviet Aeroflot (Kommersant, 2006). The Russian transport ministry counted 267 airlines with operator certificates in 2002, 85 of them owned by the state or by municipalities and 150 flying international routes; the number of operators in 2002 was 69 percent of the 1996 level (Ministry of Transport).

Transaero was built from scratch, on what it called an independent and entirely new basis. It counts its birthday as 5 November 1991, when a leased aircraft flew its first charter, Moscow to Tel Aviv and back, under the airline's own code UN (Transaero). The company describes itself as the first non-state airline in Russian history, and dates the first scheduled flight by a non-state airline in Russia, Moscow to Norilsk, to January 1993.

A new Aeroflot with the old world map

The Aeroflot name passed to a company built for international flights. On 28 July 1992 government decree No. 527 converted Aeroflot Soviet Airlines into an open joint-stock company, Aeroflot Russian International Airlines, with a controlling stake held by the federal government for up to three years (decree No. 527). The same decree handed the new airline, as legal successor, the powers under the intergovernmental air service agreements signed by Russia and the former Soviet Union, along with Aeroflot's agreements with foreign airlines. Strong summed up the result in one line: Aeroflot Russian International Airlines "has inherited the international bilateral responsibilities".

The company's charter was approved by government decree No. 314 on 12 April 1994. Kommersant read the decree as making Aeroflot the national airline, entitled to represent the country's interests on the world air transport market (Kommersant, 1994). The charter drew the new company from several pieces of the old one: Aeroflot Soviet Airlines, the central directorate of international air services, the Sheremetyevo engineering enterprise and others, while Sheremetyevo airport and an airline called Moscow Airways were split off as separate state companies. Until privatisation all the shares stayed with the federal government. The documents allowed up to 49 percent to be sold to employees, without setting a date, and the government appointed the seven-member board.

According to Kommersant, Aeroflot was one of only two airlines specialising in international flights to end 1993 with a profit, more than 200 billion roubles; the other was British Airways. In 1994 Aeroflot was registered as an open joint-stock company and kept the legal rights to its trademark, and on 28 June 1996 it held its first shareholders' meeting.

Western jets on Russian routes

The new Aeroflot also put Western aircraft on its routes. Its first foreign-built airliners were Airbus A310-300s, leased in 1992. Kommersant-Vlast dated the start of their service to 29 July 1992 and counted five new aircraft. Two years later Boeing 767-300ERs joined the fleet. On 1 October 1994 an Aeroflot 767 flew its first service from Moscow to Frankfurt, on 3 October scheduled 767 flights to New York began, and in March 1995 the airline started daily nonstop flights to New York.

Aeroflot also put new Russian aircraft on its long routes. In 1994 Aeroflot took delivery of the new Il-96-300 for intercontinental flights. On 27 May 1994 it began flying the type between Moscow and San Francisco, and in November 1995 it opened scheduled nonstop Il-96-300 flights from Moscow to Los Angeles.

Other airlines followed. Transaero says it was the first in the country to receive Boeing 737s, in April 1993, without government guarantees, and the first in Russia to fly the Boeing 757, in 1994. By mid-1995, according to Kommersant-Vlast, about 40 foreign aircraft were flying in the former Soviet republics, 26 of them in Russia, roughly half bought and half leased. Baikal-Avia flew a Boeing 757 between Irkutsk and Moscow, and Turkmenistan Airlines and the Kazakhstan airline operated Boeing 737, 757 and 747SP aircraft.

The magazine explained the choice in plain money terms. Even a long-discontinued Boeing 737-200 was cheaper to run than a Russian airliner, it wrote: it burned 15 to 20 percent less fuel and needed about 30 percent less time for pre-flight servicing. Some 70 percent of the Russian fleet was at the limit of its operating life. And the state had stopped buying: purchases of aircraft from the budget ended in 1995 (Ministry of Transport).

Aeroflot kept ordering from both sides. In 1996 it added four new A310-300s and signed a contract in April for 20 Il-96M/T aircraft with Pratt & Whitney engines and Collins avionics. In 1997 it signed for 10 new Boeing 737-400s and for the lease of two Boeing 777-200s, and in 1998 it put 11 new Boeing and Airbus aircraft into service. Even so, by 2002 older-generation Russian aircraft still flew 76 percent of Russia's passenger kilometres, new Russian types about 6 percent and foreign-built aircraft 18 percent.

What the breakup cost passengers

The numbers for Russia are stark. Rosstat counts 90.8 million air passengers in 1990, 32.1 million in 1995 and 23 million in 2000. The domestic market took the blow: 86.4 million domestic passengers in 1990, 25 million in 1995 and 14.6 million in 2000, while international traffic grew from 4.4 million to 8.4 million. The transport ministry's yearly series shows a fall in every year from 33.82 million in 1994 to a low of 22.4 million in 1999, before the first increase, to 23 million, in 2000.

The ministry later gave its explanation: from 1992 onwards traffic fell because people's real incomes fell while ticket prices had to rise; stability came only in 1999 and 2000 (Ministry of Transport). Strong saw the same thing in 1993 across the whole former Soviet Union. Economic activity had fallen by about 35 to 40 percent from the 1989 peak, air traffic by 50 to 70 percent. Some domestic routes had lost service altogether, and others carried a fifth of the traffic of four years earlier.

Strong also put numbers on prices. Average fares in 1993 were about 18 times their 1990 level, still less than the roughly 25-fold rise in consumer prices; airline costs had risen 30 to 36 times, even with fuel still subsidised, and the airlines' finances were dire. By late 1992 fuel prices had reached about 25 percent of world levels.

Safety in the decade of small airlines

On 23 March 1994 an Airbus A310-304 registered F-OGQS, flying as flight 593 from Moscow to Hong Kong, crashed near Mezhdurechensk, killing all 75 people on board, 63 passengers and 12 crew (Aviation Safety Network). The investigators found that the captain had let an outsider, his son, take his seat at the controls and intervene in the flying. Forces on the control wheel disconnected the autopilot from the ailerons without the crew noticing; the aircraft rolled, stalled, entered a spin and struck the ground two minutes and six seconds later.

For the industry as a whole, the Interstate Aviation Committee's commission found that only 19 percent of the accidents of 1994 were caused by technical failures and 80 percent by mistakes of flight crews. Among the reasons it listed was a drain of the most qualified specialists to commercial firms.

Aeroflot by 2000

In 1995 Aeroflot flew to 102 countries, with commercial and technical stops at 146 points, and carried about 3.5 million passengers on its own fleet. That year it ran the first flight of a hub programme through Shannon in Ireland, carrying passengers from the former Soviet republics and the Baltic states on to North, Central and South America, and on 14 August an A310 flew its first scheduled service from Moscow to Beijing.

Passenger numbers then rose: 3,812,000 in 1996, 3,904,100 in 1997, about 4.6 million in 1999 and, for the first time, more than 5 million in 2000 (Aeroflot chronicle, 2000). These are the figures of a single company, not of an entire national aviation system, so they cannot be set directly against the 139 million of 1990.

The company changed at the top and in the way it sold itself. On 30 May 1997 the annual shareholders' meeting elected V. M. Okulov as general director. In August 1997 Aeroflot signed a strategic alliance agreement with Air France, and in 1998 it rose to third place among Russian airlines by traffic within Russia and the former Soviet republics. In April 1999 it launched the Aeroflot Bonus frequent flyer programme, and on 10 December 1999 its website, aeroflot.ru, went live. On 24 June 2000 the shareholders' meeting voted to rename the company Aeroflot Russian Airlines, without the word "International".

Strong's 1993 forecast was that the former Soviet Union would not regain its 1989 air traffic until 2010-2015. Rosaviatsia, the federal air transport agency, says that from the early 1990s to the 2000s passenger numbers and passenger kilometres fell almost threefold, and that Russian airlines beat the 1990 record of the Russian republic, 91 million passengers, only in 2019 (Rosaviatsia). What Aeroflot did with its new name, from SkyTeam to 2022, is the subject of the next part of this series.

Fly an airline of 1995

• Era: Open Skies, 1995
• Base: Moscow, SVO
• In the catalog: Boeing 767-300ER, from 1988

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