Russian Challenge

AVIATION Russian Challenge

The makers of Sputnik are preparing another aerial challenge to the West: the world's biggest commercial air fleet. By pumping cash and talent into a crash drive to improve Soviet Russia's 1,000-plane Aeroflot, Nikita Khrushchev hopes to make it another impressive display of the achievements of Soviet technology. Says the U.S. Air Transport Association's President Stuart Tipton: "Aeroflot is visibly preparing to challenge the supremacy of Western carriers. An effective Russian civil airline will facilitate Russia's economic penetration elsewhere, serve as a vehicle for political influence and act as an effective propaganda weapon."

Aeroflot already reaches 16 foreign countries from Norway to North Korea, flies 58,000 route miles v. 64,000 for Pan American World Airways, the longest U.S. flag carrier. Last month Aeroflot won Britain's approval for flights to London, is expected to start service next fall. Now Aeroflot is dickering for landing rights in France and Holland, is expected to go after rights in the U.S. as soon as it gets enough long-range jets to fly from Moscow to New York, probably within the year.*

Prestige, Not Profit. The Soviets plug Aeroflot as "the only line in the world with mass and regular exploitation of jets." To fly into the jet age ahead of the West, Aeroflot adapted Designer Andrei Tupolev's twin-jet Badger medium-range bombers to regular commercial service. The TU-104 looks like a Victorian Pullman car with ornate chandeliers, overstuffed seats, brass serving trays and old-time chain-flush toilets. But overnight it has changed Aeroflot from a lowly regarded, primarily domestic line into a major international threat. Aeroflot has about 50 TU-104s, flies them regularly to East Berlin, Prague, Sofia and distant cities within the U.S.S.R., cuts the eight-day Moscow-to-Peking rail trip to just nine hours.

By U.S. commercial standards, the TU-104 has many shortcomings. Underpowered for a big jet, it has a range of less than 2,000 miles. It lands fast (up to 150 m.p.h.) on weak brakes, often overshoots runways. It gulps so much jet fuel that it would probably break a private line. But the Reds want prestige rather than profit, are willing to let the state-owned line fly in the red for years to come.

Aeroflot expects to convert completely to jets and turboprops by 1960, phase out the 800 to 1,000 two-engined Ilyushins (opposite number to the DC-3) that are its bread-and-lard planes. Thus, in less than three years, Aeroflot hopes to leap from the primitive, twin-engined piston stage into the four-jet age, without carefully rolling up experience on larger piston planes as Western lines have done.

Aeroflot has some impressive new models for the job. It has started to fly Tupolev's new four-jet, 500-10-600 m.p.h. TU-110s the 2,700 miles from Moscow to Irkutsk, may put the plane on longer runs to replace the TU-IO4. For ranges up to 3,000 miles, Aeroflot has shown off prototypes of two 400-m.p.h., four-engined turboprops -- Ilyushin's 100-passenger IL-18 Moskva and Antonov's 126-passenger Ukraina--that resemble Lockheed's Electra, now being test-flown. Aeroflot's highest hopes for capturing a large chunk of the foreign market rest on Tupolev's four-engined turboprop, swept-wing TU-114, a double-decked, pressurized behemoth, twice the size of a Super Constellation. The Reds claim that it is the world's fastest propeller airliner (more than 500 m.p.h.), can carry no passengers nonstop from Moscow to New York in ten hours, crowd in 220 passengers for shorter trips. Aeroflot has displayed a prototype, plans to have TU-114s in commercial operation within a year.

Comfort & Confusion. Aeroflot developed into this huge, showy line from a humble beginning. The Soviet state put it together in 1923 from remnants of the revolution's Red air force. In the 1930s Stalin purged some of Aeroflot's best brains, but in World War II he outfitted Aeroflot with hundreds of U.S. lend-lease Dakotas (DC-3s), started to expand it fast to open up underdeveloped Russian areas that had no roads or rail lines.

Today Aeroflot is actually Soviet Russia's civil air ministry. Besides hauling passengers and freight, it carries out a massive program of crop dusting and sowing; it runs meteorological and oil-pipeline surveys, organizes flying clubs, maintains all nonmilitary airports and directs two colleges which train pilots and ground technicians. It is difficult to tell where the Red air force leaves off and Aeroflot begins. Bossing it is onetime Air Force Commander in Chief (1950-57) Chief Air Marshal Pavel Zhigarev, 60. veteran pilot and bomber expert who got the airline job a year ago.

Zhigarev rules a rigidly controlled bureaucracy. So tight is his grip that a station manager in Vladivostok sometimes has to seek approval from Moscow--4,000 miles away--to effect changes. At the same time, Aeroflot is so disorganized that its 27 territorial boards print separate timetables, often in the local language, to the consternation of passengers who must change planes on a long trip.

By Western standards, Zhigarev's bureaucracy ignores the basic rules for running an airline economically. While Western lines use their planes up to twelve hours a day for money-saving "maximum utilization," Aeroflot idles dozens of planes on the ground for each one in the air. Aeroflot does not have enough good ground bases, maintenance depots or technicians to handle its huge fleet. The Russians built Aeroflot's new planes so they can use the country's rough airports, rather than improving the airports. Thus the jets sacrifice payload and range for ruggedness.

On the other hand, the line's big-city strips are long and smooth, and the terminals abound with electronic landing equipment, radar and comforts for passengers. Moscow's Victorian-style Vnukovo Airport compares with some of the best in the West, houses a transient hotel and a nursery with toys and cots for the tots.

High Fares. Aeroflot's fares are high: 11.3-c- a mile on flights inside Russia, v. the 8.6-c- charged by Western carriers for trips within Europe and only 5.3-c- for domestic U.S. flights. Passengers have trouble buying tickets in advance, since flights are often reported fully booked because clerks hold out large blocks to satisfy any last-minute demand by Soviet VIPs. A foreigner can usually wangle a seat at the last moment, even if a nontitled Soviet citizen must be bumped just before takeoff. In flight, meals are heavy and ordinary, include Georgian wines, vodka and cognac. The piston planes are un-pressurized, and many of the TU-1O4 jets are pressurized to a cabin altitude of only 9,000 ft. (v. 5,000 ft. for U.S. planes), carry oxygen masks next to each seat for passengers who cannot stand the thin air.

Aeroflot pilots, though experienced, have won a daredevil reputation for going up in bird-walking weather. This can make for tough and treacherous travel, since they fly without electronic navigation aids in the back-country areas where airports are not equipped for instrument landings. What kind of safety record they have, no Westerner knows; Aeroflot does not announce crashes unless foreigners are on board. But there have been three crashes in the past three months alone that took 30 lives.

For these reasons, Western airmen feel that Aeroflot must go a long way before it can match non-Communist airlines in reliability. The real test will come when Aeroflot pits its jets against the Western lines in the tough competition in Western Europe and across the North Atlantic.

*Looking in the other direction, lively little Alaska Airlines applied to CAB for permission to fly from Alaska to Irkutsk, Siberia.

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