Aeroflot in the 1960s: the Il-18, the Tu-114 and the road to New York

Published

2026-10-09

Updated

2026-10-09

Facts checked

2026-10-05

Aeroflot carried 16 million passengers in 1960 and 71.4 million in 1970. Most of that growth was at home, where turboprops took over the network; the routes that took longest to open were abroad. Moscow got a new international airport in 1960, but Tokyo came only in April 1967, flown jointly with Japan Airlines. New York took longer still: talks with the United States were called off in July 1960, and it was 15 July 1968 before an Aeroflot Il-62 opened the first scheduled service between Moscow and New York, 11 hours 40 minutes with a stop in Montreal.

1960: a new airport and broken-off talks

The decade began with a change of address. From 1 June 1960 Sheremetyevo replaced Vnukovo as Moscow's international airport, with Vnukovo kept as an alternate (Flight, 10 June 1960). It had a single runway, 07/25, 3,500 m long and 80 m wide, equipped with ILS. A Flight photograph of the new control tower that month showed small radar scopes on one side and, on the console, an alarm clock and a flag (Flight, 17 June 1960).

At a press conference in Moscow on 27 May 1960 the head of Aeroflot, General E. F. Loginov, made a promise: more than 50 million passengers by 1965, and by the end of 1965 more traffic than all 50 American airlines combined (Flight, 3 June 1960). At the same press conference he said that talks with Pan American had dragged on for a long time, mainly over technical problems, and had now reached government level. The statistics office later counted 42.1 million passengers for 1965.

In the spring of 1960 Aeroflot had ten Tu-114s, according to Aviation Daily, and in February it had offered to send one to New York for noise tests. Another senior Aeroflot official, Vladimir Vassiliev, told reporters in Brussels that Tu-114 services from Moscow to New York would start in the second half of the year. On the American side Pan American held the rights to a New York - Moscow service.

The agreement did not come. Talks between the two governments were due to open in Washington in July 1960; on 14 July the State Department called them off "until a more suitable time" (Flight, 12 August 1960). By then the Civil Aeronautics Board had already certificated Pan American for Russian routes for fifteen years, if and when agreement could be reached. The State Department's own record places the postponement next to the RB-47 incident: on 1 July the Soviet Union had shot down a US Air Force RB-47 over the Barents Sea. Aeroflot's first deputy chief, Lieutenant General G. S. Shchetchikov, who toured American airports that summer, called the break a temporary misunderstanding.

The turboprop years

At home Aeroflot was trying to beat the railways. In 1961 its representative in London, Captain Yarotsky, said that air fares on the Moscow - Leningrad route and to the Far East were now lower than the train fare, and that Aeroflot's aim was to take passengers from the railways; it flew twelve types of aircraft and helicopters (Flight, 10 February 1961). He listed them: the Tu-104, Tu-114, Tu-124, Il-12, Il-14, Il-18, An-2, An-10 and Yak-12 aircraft and the Mi-1, Mi-4 and Ka-15 helicopters.

The aircraft that made this possible were turboprops. In the autumn of 1961 G. A. Piskov, deputy chief of Aeroflot's passenger department, said that in 1960 Soviet aircraft had carried as many passengers as in the two previous years combined. Il-18s, An-10s and Tu-114s, he said, carried 60 per cent of all domestic air traffic, and in August 1961 alone Aeroflot carried about 100,000 passengers to and from Sochi. Flight's report from the Paris air show in June 1961 gave 24 April 1961 as the date of the Tu-114's first passenger service, Moscow - Khabarovsk, and quoted one of its crew as saying that ten were in service (Flight, 1 June 1961). From 1 December 1961 the Tu-114 flew to Khabarovsk five times a week. According to Aeroflot's 1983 brochure, the Tu-124 and the An-24 joined the medium-haul routes in 1962.

Air travel was taking a larger share of a growing whole. By a calculation on the statistics office's figures, aviation accounted for 4.8 per cent of all passenger-kilometres on public transport in 1960 and 10.4 per cent in 1965. Aeroflot's passenger-kilometres rose from 12.1 billion in 1960 to 38.1 billion in 1965 and 53.5 billion in 1967.

Some flights were made to show what the aircraft could do. On 2 February 1962 an Il-18 and an An-12 completed a flight from Moscow to Antarctica and back; their captains, A. S. Polyakov and B. S. Osipov, were made Heroes of Socialist Labour.

Havana and the price of a ticket

Aeroflot's international timetable for the winter of 1962-1963 listed 27 destinations abroad, from Accra to Helsinki, including Jakarta, Conakry, Rabat and Khartoum. The fleet on these routes was the Tu-104A with 70 seats, the Tu-104B with 100, the Il-18 with 80 to 89 and the Il-14 with 24 to 36. Havana was not on the list.

By the summer timetable of 1963, valid from 1 April, Havana is there: a Tu-114, flight SU-047, left Moscow on Mondays and took 20 hours 5 minutes; the return, SU-048, left on Wednesdays and took 16 hours 25 minutes (Aeroflot timetable, summer 1963). A one-way ticket cost 693 roubles in first class and 473.60 in tourist class; a return, 1,247.40 and 852.50. By another account the flights began earlier: Popular Mechanics dates the first to 1962, with a refuelling stop in Guinea; the timetables neither confirm nor rule that out (Popular Mechanics).

The same timetable shows what Havana meant in money. A one-way ticket from Moscow to London on a Tu-104A, flight SU-031 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4 hours 5 minutes, cost 209.20 roubles in first class and 166.40 in tourist class; Moscow - Paris cost 185.90 and 149.90. In first class, Havana cost more than three times as much as London.

From directorate to ministry

On 27 July 1964 a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet turned the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet into an all-Union Ministry of Civil Aviation. A CIA assessment of 1983 describes the arrangement that followed: Aeroflot reported directly to the ministry and made up by far the largest part of its work. The same year a research institute for the use of civil aviation in the national economy was set up in Krasnodar. In 1964 Moscow also opened Domodedovo, which Aeroflot's 1983 brochure calls the largest airport in the country, and on 31 December 1965 the Moscow City Air Terminal, the largest in the USSR, opened in the city.

E. F. Loginov, head of the civil air fleet from around 1960, signed the 1966 agreement with the United States for the Soviet government; by 1970 the minister was B. P. Bugaev, the pilot who had flown the first Tu-104 service to Prague in 1956.

The Il-62 and the agreement with the United States

The aircraft for the long routes was the Il-62. The government assigned the project to the Ilyushin bureau in 1960, and the first prototype, CCCP-06156, flew on 2 January 1963 with V. K. Kokkinaki in command (Ilyushin). It was the last project of Sergei Ilyushin and the last aircraft Kokkinaki tested; until the Il-86 arrived, it was Aeroflot's flagship. In 1965 the USSR brought the Il-62 to the Paris air show together with the Tu-124, Tu-134, An-12, An-24 and three Mil helicopters. The next year brought the first international cargo line, Moscow - Riga - Paris, on 3 February 1966, and the first flight of the Yak-40 on 21 October.

On 4 November 1966 the civil air transport agreement between the United States and the USSR was signed in Washington: for the United States by Llewellyn E. Thompson, for the Soviet Union by E. F. Loginov (United Nations Treaty Series). Aeroflot got the route Moscow - New York and return, Pan American the route New York - Moscow and return, both "nonstop in both directions, except for agreed technical stops". Pan Am aircraft were to enter the Soviet Union over Ventspils and land at Sheremetyevo, with Vnukovo as an alternate; Aeroflot was to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Tokyo, Montreal, New York

Tokyo came first. On 17 April 1967 Aeroflot and JAL opened a direct Moscow - Tokyo service to Haneda with a 116-seat Tu-114, at the time, as the Japanese trade paper Aviation Wire notes, the largest passenger aircraft in the world (Aviation Wire). The first flight reached Tokyo on 18 April, the first from Tokyo left on 20 April, and the route ran once a week. The aircraft and the pilots were Aeroflot's, the cabin crew JAL's, and the two airlines split revenue and costs equally. JAL began its own flights to Moscow only on 28 March 1970, with a DC-8-62, twice a week.

On 15 September 1967 the Il-62 entered service on the long route to Montreal, according to Aeroflot's chronicle; the airline's 1983 brochure dates the start of Il-62 long-haul operations to 1966.

New York followed on 15 July 1968. Time's correspondent Jerry Hannifin flew on the Il-62 that opened the service, a 122-seat aircraft under Captain Boris Egorov (Time, 26 July 1968). The flight left from Sheremetyevo. Before departure 97 passengers with tickets crowded up the ramp; a Soviet border guard, Hannifin wrote, for some mysterious reason turned three of them back. At 10:55 Moscow time Egorov started the engines, and in less than 20 minutes the aircraft was cruising at 34,000 ft. The tourist cabin, Hannifin wrote, was roomier and more comfortable than tourist class on most European and some American airlines, with six-abreast foam-rubber seats whose armrests could be lifted. After 11 hours 40 minutes, including a stop at Montreal, the aircraft was over New York on time.

Then it waited. Kennedy control reported serious delays because of a slowdown by the tower staff and offered the Soviet flight priority; Egorov declined and radioed that Aeroflot Zero Three would go in turn like the rest. The aircraft circled for an hour and 35 minutes before it was cleared to land. By Time's account, Egorov put it down on a little-used runway at about 220 mph, much faster than the 175 mph landing speed of a Boeing 707, and, in Hannifin's words, as smooth as butter. A supplementary agreement of 4 November 1966 named Stockholm, Oslo, Shannon and Gander as technical stops and allowed others by mutual consent. Both first flights stopped elsewhere: Aeroflot in Montreal, Pan Am in Copenhagen.

The same day Pan Am opened its own route the other way. Flight 44, the Boeing 707 N405PA Clipper Stargazer, landed in Moscow with 56 American diplomats, publishers and newsmen on board; a second aircraft full of paying passengers followed (Pan Am Historical Foundation). When it entered Soviet airspace over Latvia, Riga control answered with a crisp "proceed". In the cockpit were Robert M. Weeks, chief pilot of Pan Am's Atlantic Division, and Flight Captain Ralph Hunt. The Copenhagen stop was for fuel.

What the decade added up to

By the statistics office's figures, Aeroflot carried 42.1 million passengers in 1965, 68 million in 1969 and 71.4 million in 1970. Over 1960-1970 passenger numbers grew 4.5 times. The route network grew from 375,200 km in 1960 to 481,100 km in 1965 and 694,000 km in 1969. The seat load factor was 69.1 per cent in 1965, 75 per cent in 1969 and 74.9 per cent in 1970.

International traffic stayed a small part of the business. The international network grew from 36,100 km in 1960 to 224,600 km in 1970, but international passengers rose only from 0.2 million to 0.9 million a year. A CIA assessment of 1983 says that fifteen years earlier, around 1968, Aeroflot served 44 countries; by 1983 it served 94, 82 of them non-communist, more than any other international airline. The CIA believed that most of its international routes, especially those to the Third World, lost hard currency (CIA).

Part of the work had nothing to do with passengers. Aeroflot sprayed and dusted farmland and forests from the air: 20.08 million hectares in 1960, 55.04 million in 1965, 83.28 million in 1970.

The decade ended with a new kind of aircraft. On 31 December 1968 the supersonic Tu-144 made its first flight; according to Aeroflot's 1983 brochure, passengers flew on it only in 1977. The 1970s are the subject of the next part of this series.

Fly an airline of 1965

• Era: Jet Boom, 1965
• Base: Moscow, SVO
• In the catalog: Ilyushin Il-62, from 1967

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