Over the Ocean to Russia

Although Aeroflot, the Soviet Union's national airline, flies regularly to 25 non-Communist cities,* its only service into the Western Hemisphere has been a twice weekly flight to Havana that serves little purpose except propaganda. Last week, winding up an eleven-day tour of Canada, Soviet Deputy Premier Dmitry Poliansky put Aeroflot on the North American mainland. He signed an agreement under which the Russian airline and Air Canada will jointly operate twice-weekly service between Montreal and Moscow by way of Copenhagen. The flight will take nine hours, cost $570 for a 21-day round-trip tourist ticket or $1,170 first class.

The new service, which begins in November, took a long time to negotiate. The idea occurred originally to Air Canada's President Gordon Mc Gregor, 65, a World War II fighter pilot who has built Air Canada into a flourishing line with 42,000 miles of route to the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean. McGregor wanted Moscow on his route as well, flew there for discussions with General E. F. Loginov, who is both Aeroflot's head and Russia's director of civil aviation. Discussions between the governments droned on, but one reason the agreement finally got airborne was that the Russians were anxious to secure Western currency, and the air service seemed a promising way to get some.

Air Canada, flying one round trip each week, will use DC-8s. On foreign flights, Aeroflot now uses huge 170-passenger, two-deck TU-114 turboprops, but for the Montreal run it may inaugurate the new 200-passenger Ilyushin 62s, which have four engines mounted in pods at the tail, as well as a fancy jet-age decor replacing the Victorian look of older Russian airplanes.

* Accra, Algiers, Amsterdam, Bagdad, Bamako, Brussels, Colombo, Conakry, Copenhagen, Damascus, Djakarta, Helsinki, Kabul, Karachi, London, New Delhi, Nicosia, Paris, Rabat, Rangoon, Rome, Stockholm, Teheran, Tunis and Vienna.

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