Aeroflot in the 1950s: from the Li-2 to its first jet service in 1956

Published

2026-10-06

Updated

2026-10-06

Facts checked

2026-10-05

Aeroflot began the 1950s as a piston-engined airline: in 1950 it carried 1.5 million passengers and 160,000 tonnes of cargo and mail. The change came on 15 September 1956, when a Tu-104 flew Aeroflot's first scheduled jet service, Moscow - Omsk - Irkutsk, covering 4,570 km in 7 hours 10 minutes. For the next two years, until 4 October 1958, no other jet airliner flew scheduled airline services anywhere. By 1960 Aeroflot was carrying 16 million passengers a year, more than ten times the 1950 figure.

A piston airline: 19 hours to Irkutsk

Aeroflot came out of the 1940s bigger than it went in. In 1940 it carried 0.4 million passengers on a network of 146,300 km; by 1950 the network had grown to 300,500 km and the passenger count to 1.5 million (Narodnoye khozyaystvo SSSR, 1970). That year its passengers flew a total of 1.2 billion passenger-kilometres.

The aircraft that did the work were small and slow. The Il-12 had carried its first passengers on 1 June 1947. Its successor, the Il-14, went to Aeroflot for trials in 1952 and entered airline service in 1954. By an official Aeroflot description that Flight quoted in January 1957, the Il-12 normally had only 18 seats and the Li-2, the Soviet-built Dakota, just 14.

What the airline sold was time. In Aeroflot's comparative figures, printed by Flight, a trip from Moscow to Irkutsk took 19 hours 5 minutes by air and 119 hours 40 minutes by train. Vladivostok was 40 hours 35 minutes away by air and 220 hours 5 minutes by rail; Tashkent was 10 hours 40 minutes against 94 hours 35 minutes; Tbilisi, 8 hours against 68 hours 40 minutes. On the long routes even a slow airliner saved days.

The ticket itself changed in the middle of the decade. Domestic fares had long come in two classes, first and second, for soft and hard seats; by the winter of 1956-1957 only one rate was quoted, and a 10 per cent discount on return tickets was to be introduced for the first time. Until then a return fare simply cost twice the single.

In Moscow, all international flights and a large number of domestic ones, including the Tu-104 services, used Vnukovo, and the remaining lines flew from Bykovo. A bus ran to Vnukovo from Sverdlov Square between 5 a.m. and 12.45 a.m., and travellers were told to allow a little over two hours for the trip and the airport formalities.

Who made the decisions

Aeroflot was run as a government directorate, not as a company. In May 1954 the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, which operated it, was placed directly under the USSR Council of Ministers. The men at the top were military. In the mid-1950s the directorate was run by Marshal of Aviation S. F. Zhavoronkov; Flight's airline directory of May 1957 named Marshal P. F. Zhigarev as director general; around 1960 the head was General E. F. Loginov.

The limits of their power showed in the question of foreign airlines. A 2023 study by the historian A. I. Rupasov, based on Russian foreign policy and economic archives, describes how the civil air directorate was willing to let the Finnish airline Aero into the USSR, while the chief of the General Staff, Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, simply declared that he would never allow it, because Finland was a capitalist country (Rupasov, 2023). The decision went up to the party Central Committee and the Council of Ministers: on 18 April 1955 the Finns were allowed to fly to Moscow, but not to Leningrad. Even then, Rupasov writes, the military went on resisting, and the directorate had to appeal to the head of government.

On 19 October 1955 the two governments signed an agreement on Finnish flights to Moscow by way of Narva and Velikiye Luki. Together with an agreement between Aero and Aeroflot, it made Finland, as Rupasov writes, the first country outside the Eastern bloc allowed to fly to Moscow with its own aircraft. Finnair began commercial flights to Vnukovo on 18 February 1956, twice a week with a Convair 440 (Airways).

The jet came out of the same system. In June 1954 the Council of Ministers ordered a passenger jet, the Tu-104, for up to 50 passengers, built on the basis of the Tu-16 bomber. The manufacturer explains the choice by the saving in time and money, and by the fact that military pilots who already knew the bomber could quickly teach young airline pilots to fly it (Tupolev). The design itself is the subject of a separate article, the Tu-104.

London, March 1956

The prototype first flew on 17 June 1955 with test pilot Yu. T. Alasheyev at the controls. Nine months later the West got a close look at it. On 22 March 1956 a Tu-104 landed at London Airport carrying General Ivan Serov, head of the Soviet security services. A cold and blustery day had turned to rain. At five minutes past noon the aircraft appeared directly over the airfield; after landing it rolled about 3,000 ft before turning off to its parking place, and later it took 60,000 lb of kerosene aboard.

Flight did not mince words: one glance, it wrote, was enough to see a civilianised Badger medium bomber (Flight, 30 March 1956). The flight from Moscow had taken 3 hours 36 minutes at 10,000 m. Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin came to Britain a month later: in April Flight reported the two leaders flying from Birmingham to RAF Marham, with A. N. Tupolev in their party.

The aircraft was still a prototype. The first Tu-104s began reaching the civil air fleet in May 1956.

15 September 1956: Irkutsk in seven hours

On 15 September 1956 a Tu-104 flew the first scheduled service on the Moscow - Omsk - Irkutsk route. The captain was E. P. Barabash, and the aircraft covered 4,570 km, with one stop in Omsk, in 7 hours 10 minutes. The date is given by the manufacturer, by Aeroflot's own chronicle and by Flight six days after the flight (Flight, 21 September 1956). Two sources differ: the editor of the ABC World Airways Guide, writing in Flight in January 1957, gave 16 September, and the Kyiv aviation museum gives 19 September.

For the passenger the gain was plain. The same trip on a piston airliner had taken 19 hours 5 minutes; now it took 7 hours 10 minutes, three times a week in each direction. Guinness World Records gives different, rounder figures: 18 hours down to 7. Other routes followed within weeks. Flight reported a Tu-104 service between Moscow and Tbilisi from 20 September; by mid-October a nonstop flight on Mondays covered it in two and a half hours instead of the usual eight, and from 17 October a Tu-104 flew nonstop to Tashkent every Wednesday in four hours.

Aeroflot's first international jet service came on 12 October 1956: Moscow - Prague. Its captain, B. P. Bugaev, later became Minister of Civil Aviation, as Aeroflot's own 1983 chronicle notes. The Tu-104 skipped the usual stop at Vilnius and flew the route in two and a half hours, against slightly over seven by other aircraft; it ran twice a week, with daily flights planned. In Prague it connected with the Air France service from Paris, and the combination made a one-day trip from Paris to Moscow possible: the fastest link between Western Europe and Moscow.

Two years alone on the scheduled routes

Aeroflot's and Tupolev's own histories call the Tu-104 the world's first passenger jet. Flight saw it differently at the time. Its report of October 1956 ran under the headline "World's second jet service" and noted that, despite the obvious wish to impress the West with the "Silver Arrow", as the aircraft was reported to be called, no official record of its progress was forthcoming.

The first had been the British Comet, and by 1956 it was gone. After a crash in April 1954 BOAC suspended its Comet services, and the five Comet 1As of UAT and Air France were grounded on 9 April 1954. Scheduled jet service in the West returned on 4 October 1958, when a BOAC Comet 4 took on passengers at London Airport for the first transatlantic jet service (Flight, 10 October 1958).

Between those dates the Tu-104 was the only jet airliner flying scheduled airline services anywhere in the world. The claim needs three qualifications. It is about turbojets: turboprop airliners were already flying. It is about scheduled airlines: from 1956 the Royal Air Force flew Comet C.2 transports that could carry up to 44 troops (de Havilland Aircraft Museum). And other jet airliners were in the air on tests and at shows: the Tu-110, the Caravelle in Swedish cold-weather trials.

The lead had a price. On 15 August and 17 October 1958 two Tu-104As crashed, killing 64 and 80 people. Both crashes are described in the Tu-104 article.

The road west

Paris came before London. On 4 August 1958 Aeroflot flew its first scheduled Moscow - Paris service, a Tu-104 with 16 passengers nonstop in 3 hours 51 minutes (Flight, 15 August 1958).

London took longer. A provisional agreement between the two governments was signed on 19 December 1957. On 14 May 1959 a BEA Viscount 806, G-AOYS, under Captain G. G. McLannahan, opened the London - Moscow service, and two days later an Aeroflot Tu-104A flew the reciprocal service.

Much of the growth abroad rested on paper rather than aircraft. By early 1957 Aeroflot had interline agreements, which let passengers book through from one carrier's network to another's, with Air France, Air India International, BEA, ČSA, Finnair, JAT, KLM, LOT, Malév, Pan American, Sabena, SAS, Swissair and others.

The turboprop wave

Turboprops followed the jet. The Il-18 Moskva first flew on 4 July 1957 with V. K. Kokkinaki at the controls, according to the Ilyushin design bureau, and six days later it was on show at the Vnukovo air display, next to the Tu-110 jet (Ilyushin). It entered scheduled passenger service on 20 April 1959, first between Moscow and Adler and Moscow and Alma-Ata (Flight, 1 July 1960).

The Antonov An-10A followed in July 1959, after almost a year of reliability testing on scheduled cargo flights between Kiev and Moscow. Flight wrote that the reason for the delay was unknown, but that some aerodynamic problems seemed to have needed correcting. The first An-10 seated 84 passengers, the An-10A 100.

The Tu-114 began its tests on 15 November 1957. On 28 June 1959 it flew nonstop from Moscow to Idlewild airport in New York in 11 hours, carrying its designer and Soviet officials to the Soviet exhibition there. On 15 September 1959 Nikita Khrushchev landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 1 p.m. (U.S. State Department, FRUS) and told his hosts that his flight had begun in Moscow that same morning (American Presidency Project). He flew in a Tu-114: in November Flight printed a letter saying that he had left America in his Tu-114. Regular passenger flights on the type came later. Aeroflot's chronicle dates a first flight with passengers to Khabarovsk to May 1959, but in November 1959 Flight still wrote of Tu-114 routes as planned, and in 1961 it reported the first passenger service, Moscow - Khabarovsk, on 24 April.

Flight could only estimate the fleet. In May 1959 its correspondent was told on several occasions, by several people, that 40 Il-18s were in service. The magazine's own guess was at least 100 Tu-104s, and about half a dozen Tu-114s were said to be flying.

The same correspondent left a picture of Vnukovo that month: fifteen Tu-104 fins sticking up shark-like behind a slope, a cluster of six Il-18s, countless dozens of Il-14s. The boarding steps drove out to meet his Viscount under their own power, and arriving Tu-104s taxied right up to the terminal entrance to let their passengers off before a lorry towed them away. An American engineer from Sikorsky, Ralph Alex, who flew around the country that year, counted 70 seats on his Tu-104A, with three stewardesses and good meals en route; his Il-18 carried 82 passengers, and the noise in its large galley, he wrote, was unbearable.

What the numbers said

The growth was real, but visitors were given no single figure for it. Taking 1950 as 100, the Central Statistical Administration put Aeroflot's passenger traffic at 166 in 1955, 204 in 1956, 345 in 1957 and 542 in 1958: roughly 2.5 million passengers in 1955 and 8.1 million in 1958 (Narodnoye khozyaystvo SSSR v 1958 godu). Passenger-kilometres grew from 2.8 billion in 1955 to 12.1 billion in 1960.

For 1958 alone they heard three. The head of domestic traffic, Zelenov, told Flight 10 million passengers; Marshal Zhigarev gave British journalists 15 million; Aeroflot officials Yeromasov and Grachev told the American Ralph Alex about 8 million. The last was the closest to the statistics. For scale, Flight added that US airlines had carried just over 49 million passengers in 1958, and American Airlines alone more than 7.2 million.

Forecasts missed in both directions. In February 1958 Moscow Radio promised that the new turboprops would raise passenger traffic in 1958 by more than 27 per cent. By the statistics office's index, traffic actually grew by about 57 per cent, although the Il-18 and the An-10 entered passenger service only in 1959.

In 1960 General Loginov announced what he called official traffic figures for the first time: more than 20 million passengers in 1959, and more than 50 million expected by 1965 (Flight, 3 June 1960). The statistics office counted about 12 million for 1959, 16 million for 1960 and 42.1 million for 1965. The seven-year plan for 1959-1965 asked for a sixfold increase in air traffic.

The decade still ended with a more than tenfold rise: 16 million passengers in 1960. International traffic stayed small. Aeroflot carried 0.03 million international passengers in 1950 and 0.2 million in 1960, while its international network grew from 19,100 to 36,100 km.

What came next

The decade closed with a new airport. Aeroflot says Sheremetyevo opened in August 1959; Flight reported that from 1 June 1960 it replaced Vnukovo as Moscow's international airport. The 1960s, with the Tu-114, the Il-62 and the first flight to New York, are the subject of the next part of this series.

Fly an airline of 1955

• Era: Jet Age, 1955
• In the catalog: Tupolev Tu-104, from 1956

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