Aeroflot: An Airline and its Aircraft: An Illustrated History of the World’s Largest Airline

This is a history of the Soviet airline that, in the latter 1960s, became the biggest in the world, measured by passenger boardings and passenger-miles flown. Most of this air traffic was on the vast and complex domestic network, many of whose sub-divisions alone would equate in size to a very large airline. Most of the domestic passengers have flown at very cheap fares, in the aerial equivalent of long-distance bus services, almost as a public utility. The extent of the achievement in bringing the benefits of air transport to more than 3,500 communities, otherwise dependent upon long and arduous surface transport, often over long distances, has not been generally realized. Neither have the pioneering efforts of Aeroflot been fully recognized in the West, nor have the enterprising efforts of its Polar Aviation affiliate been fully remembered. The trans-Polar flights of Chkalov and Gomov are a distant memory. This has resulted partly from the extreme difficulty in obtaining information from behind what was once described as the Iron Curtain. Until Mikhail Gorbachev swept restrictions aside with his policies of glasnost and perestroika, the sparse data available gave only a sporadic glimpse of Aeroflots work. This book now offers a panorama of the seventy years of considerable and continuous achievement. It records the development of the world’s first transport aircraft in 1913, the first bomber/transport to be put into series production, the world’s first sustained jet airline service and the world’s largest turboprop airliner. It describes the world’s largest helicopters and the world’s largest cargo jet aircraft. At the other end of the scale of magnitude, Aeroflot operates about 2,500 of the diminutive piston-engined biplane which is the world’s most produced commercial transport aircraft in history. As this book is published, the former Soviet airline is undergoing a metamorphosis. But nothing can erase the fascination of Aeroflot’s historical record — and incidentally, it is a great story.