Aeroflot in the 1970s: a hundred million passengers a year

Published

2026-10-13

Updated

2026-10-13

Facts checked

2026-10-05

Aeroflot began the 1970s carrying 71.4 million passengers a year and ended them at 103.8 million. Halfway through, in 1976, it became by its own account the first airline in the world to carry more than 100 million passengers in a year. The fleet changed with the numbers: the Tu-154 entered scheduled service in February 1972. It was not a smooth decade. By a CIA estimate, at least ten scheduled airliners crashed in twelve months of 1972-1973, killing more than 500 people. And it had a short supersonic episode: from November 1977 to May 1978 the Tu-144 carried passengers to Alma-Ata.

1970: joining the system

The decade opened with paperwork and with new routes. The Soviet Union deposited its notification of adherence to the Chicago Convention on 15 October 1970 and became a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization on 14 November; the Minister of Civil Aviation, B. P. Bugaev, was appointed chairman of the Soviet commission for ICAO affairs (Aeroflot chronicle). In 1975 Bugaev also became chairman of the newly created Comecon standing commission for civil aviation.

The network grew that year in both directions. On 29 July 1970 Aeroflot opened scheduled services to New York by three routes at once: from Moscow via Amsterdam, from Moscow via Paris and Montreal, and from Moscow via Leningrad and Amsterdam. The same year an Il-62 flying Paris - Moscow - Tokyo opened what Aeroflot called its trans-Siberian trunk route; later the airline flew to Tokyo along it from London, Rome, Copenhagen and Frankfurt. Copenhagen - Moscow - Tokyo flights began on 21 January 1971, and earlier that month, on 1 January, an Il-62 flew the first scheduled service from Moscow to Havana.

The management of international flights changed too. On 29 January 1971 Aeroflot set up its Central Directorate of International Air Services on the basis of the transport directorate of international air lines.

The jets that carried the decade

The new trunk-route jet of the decade was the Tu-154. Design work began in 1963, the prototype first flew on 3 October 1968 with test pilot Yu. V. Sukhov at the controls, and the first scheduled passenger service followed on 9 February 1972 (Tupolev). The type was built at the aircraft plant in Kuibyshev. The Tu-154B version, with a take-off weight of 98 tonnes, was developed at the end of 1975; it seated 164 to 180 passengers and cruised at 900 km/h. In all, 930 were built, and 166 of them, of various versions, went abroad.

For the long routes Ilyushin was preparing the Il-62M. The prototype first flew on 13 March 1969, and the first production aircraft, built in Kazan, on 15 February 1972 (Ilyushin). It differed from the original Il-62 in its more economical D-30KU engines. Until the Il-86 arrived the two versions were Aeroflot's flagships, and 30 Il-62s and 51 Il-62Ms flew abroad (Ilyushin).

How many aircraft Aeroflot had was not published in the USSR: fleet figures were treated as a state secret, and the picture comes from CIA estimates. A 1983 assessment counted 365 significant aircraft in 1960 and 3,033 in 1977, of which 191 and 1,369 were jets (CIA). In 1977, by that estimate, Aeroflot had 128 Tu-154s, 232 Tu-134s, 89 Il-62s and Il-62Ms and 710 Yak-40s, and alongside them 820 An-24s, 343 Il-18s and 136 Tu-104s were still flying. Most of the jets, the CIA wrote in 1983, had entered service in the previous ten years, at an average of 140 aircraft a year.

An earlier CIA report, of 1975, shows how that began. The jet fleet was then approaching 1,000 aircraft, about 450 of them added since 1971, and more than half the jets were Yak-40s (CIA, 1975). By the report's table, between 1970 and 1974 the number of Yak-40s grew from 120 to 510, of Tu-134s from 50 to 145 and of Il-62s and Il-62Ms from 28 to 58, while the Tu-154, of which there were three in 1971, reached 52 by 1974. The 30-seat Yak-40 could use unprepared airfields, and in three years it made new services possible to more than 200 rural locations in eastern Russia and Siberia. The Tu-134A, Tu-154 and Il-62M had meanwhile replaced about half of the 356 Il-18s.

The Il-76 freighter did not reach Aeroflot at once. In 1975, by the CIA's estimate, most of the Il-76s built so far were going to the military, with Aeroflot getting a few, probably for domestic cargo routes. According to Aeroflot's brochure, the transport, which could carry about 40 tonnes, completed its trials in 1976 and entered service in 1977. On 5 April 1978 an Il-76 flew its first service from Moscow to Sofia, and on 24 April a scheduled cargo line for large containers opened between Moscow and Luxembourg with the Il-76T.

Safety and service, seen from outside

How American intelligence saw the Aeroflot of those years is known from two CIA reports. According to the 1983 one, in a 12-month period in 1972 and 1973 at least ten scheduled Aeroflot airliners crashed, killing more than 500 people; after that spate of accidents the Soviets set up an aviation safety committee. The earlier report from the same agency, of 1975, gives the same count (at least ten aircraft in scheduled service and at least 500 dead in the year to the end of 1973) and adds detail: pilot error, bad weather or both were the main cause of at least seven of the crashes (CIA, 1975). The flight safety committee was set up under the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and in June 1975 it was turned into a civil aviation flight safety commission with several ministries on it. Over a year and a half accidents became much rarer: by September 1975 the CIA knew of one that year, a Yak-40 that went down near Batumi in mid-July, killing 28 people. By 1983, in the same agency's judgment, Aeroflot had earned a reputation as a reliable carrier on international routes.

The CIA did not think much of the service either, but it noted the changes. Before 1970, by its account, Aeroflot flew outdated equipment without most of the comforts common in the West, and served few if any meals on international flights. In the 1970s the airline put its best pilots on international routes and adopted Western ways there: in-flight catering, advertising, decor and ticketing. In 1973 an Air Service Agency was set up under the ministry to handle ticket sales, transfers and schedules, and an IBM reservation system was bought for Moscow. Even so, the CIA recorded in 1975, most Western travellers found the airline still far from Western standards.

One more crash of those years happened not on a scheduled flight but at an air show. On 3 June 1973 the first production Tu-144 crashed during a demonstration flight at Le Bourget; the crew, led by test pilot M. V. Kozlov, was killed.

As far as Lima

Aeroflot's longest route went to Lima, more than 16,000 km away. The sources disagree about when it opened. Aeroflot's chronicle gives 27 May 1973 and the route Moscow - Rabat - Havana - Lima - Santiago, flown by an Il-62; the airline's own 1983 brochure dates the opening of the Moscow - Lima line to 1974. According to the CIA's 1975 report, service to Peru had begun as early as November 1972, as a technical stop on the way to Santiago; the Santiago flights ended with the fall of the Allende government in September 1973, and Aeroflot then flew to Peru once a week via Havana. By 1983, on the CIA's figures, there were four flights a week to Lima.

Lima was the edge of a map that was filling in fast. Between 1968 and 1977, by the CIA's estimate, the number of countries Aeroflot served rose from 44 to 77, and the number of weekly flights more than doubled. The network in sub-Saharan Africa grew most of all: routes there quadrupled, reaching 23 countries. In the Middle East and North Africa the count went from 10 to 13 countries, and in South and Southeast Asia from five to ten. In December 1974, for example, flights began to N'Djamena in Chad and Malabo in Equatorial Guinea.

What flew abroad, and how often, changed as well. In 1970, according to the CIA's 1975 report, Aeroflot operated about 120 international services a week, 58 of them to 42 non-communist countries and 62 to ten communist ones, with outdated aircraft and frequent delays. By 1975 there were more than 260 a week, and most were flown by Tu-134As, Tu-154s and Il-62Ms instead of Tu-104s, Tu-124s and Il-18s (CIA, 1975). Tu-134s, for example, flew from Leningrad to Helsinki (four times a week), Hamburg and Zurich and from Kiev to Vienna, and a Tu-154 from Khabarovsk to Niigata.

With Western Europe, by the CIA's account, Aeroflot flew under pooling agreements: revenues were put together and split equally. In the early 1970s Moscow pressed Pan Am to accept a similar pool, but Pan Am chose straight competition.

For all that, international flights remained a small part of the business. Aeroflot carried 0.9 million international passengers in 1970, 2.1 million in 1975 and 2.6 million in 1980, about 2.5 per cent of all its passengers that year; passenger-kilometres on international routes grew from 2.7 billion in 1970 to 9.3 billion in 1980.

A hundred million passengers

The big numbers were made at home. By the statistics office's count Aeroflot carried 71.4 million passengers in 1970, 98.1 million in 1975 and 100.9 million in 1976 (statistics office, 1980). Aeroflot's 1983 brochure claimed a first for that year: "Aeroflot was the first of the world's airlines to carry more than 100 million passengers in a year" (Aeroflot, 1983). It did not stay above 100 million at once: in 1977 traffic fell to 92.9 million, in 1978 it was 97.8 million, and only in 1979 did it pass the mark again, at 101.9 million. The statistics office closed 1980 at 103.8 million; the brochure gives 103.3 million for the same year.

Other measures grew too. Over the decade passenger-kilometres rose from 78.2 billion to 161 billion and the route network from 773,000 to 996,000 km. Of that network, 596,000 km lay inside the Soviet Union in 1970 and 780,000 km in 1980, including 254,000 and 364,000 km of Union-level trunk routes (statistics office, 1983). There were fewer empty seats: the seat load factor was 74.9 per cent in 1970, 79.8 per cent in 1975 and 81.1 per cent in 1980. Aeroflot carried 1,844,000 tonnes of cargo and mail in 1970 and 2,989,000 tonnes in 1980, and treated 83.3 million hectares of farmland and forest from the air in 1970 and 100.3 million in 1980.

From outside it looked like this. The CIA's 1975 report called Aeroflot the world's largest airline: by its estimate the airline carried 90 million people in 1974, about a fifth of the world total, and served more than 3,700 places in the USSR and 67 countries abroad, with 95 per cent of its passengers flying inside the country (CIA, 1975). In the 1970s, by the same estimate, Soviet aviation policy shifted from extending the network to improving service.

The Tu-144 on the line

The supersonic Tu-144 came to passengers in stages. In 1975 Soviet officials promised limited scheduled domestic service by the end of the year, and the CIA, passing this on, noted that Soviet dates for inaugural flights had usually been too optimistic (CIA, 1975). On 26 December 1975 a Tu-144 flew its first operational service, Moscow - Alma-Ata, with cargo and mail. Those flights, the manufacturer says, ran at 18,000 m and 2,200 km/h. Production Tu-144s with NK-144A engines were built in Voronezh until early 1977; according to Tupolev, this was the first passenger aircraft in the USSR to receive a national certificate of airworthiness.

Passengers first flew on the Tu-144 on 1 November 1977, again to Alma-Ata. It covered the 3,260 km at 16,000 to 17,000 m and 2,000 km/h; flights ran once a week with no more than 80 passengers on board. This lasted until May 1978: by the manufacturer's count Aeroflot crews flew 55 services and carried 3,284 passengers.

A crash ended it. On 23 May 1978 the first production Tu-144D crashed near Yegoryevsk: a fuel line failed in the engine bay, the crew landed with the gear up, and two flight-test engineers were killed (Tupolev). According to the manufacturer, this crash was the direct cause of the suspension and then the end of Tu-144 flights with passengers. Aircraft No. 04-1, which flew the first operational service in December 1975, now stands in the museum at Monino.

Schools, an icebreaker and a holiday

A large establishment grew up around the flying. In 1971 the Moscow Institute of Civil Aviation Engineers opened and the Leningrad higher aviation school became the Academy of Civil Aviation; higher flying schools opened in Aktyubinsk in 1975 and in Kirovograd in 1978. In 1973, for its fiftieth anniversary, Soviet civil aviation received the Order of the October Revolution. There was work far from the passenger routes as well: in 1977 Aeroflot aircraft and helicopters helped to guide the nuclear icebreaker Arktika through the ice of the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. And in 1979 the industry got a holiday of its own: a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet established Aeroflot Day, on the second Sunday of February. The next part of this series covers the 1980s: the Il-86, the Moscow Olympics and the limits the system ran into.

Fly an airline of 1975

• Era: Widebody Era, 1975
• Base: Moscow, SVO
• In the catalog: Tupolev Tu-154, from 1972

Start in 1975

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