Next Stop Moscow

The possibility of direct commercial flights between Moscow and New York has long frozen and thawed with changes in the cold war. First proposed in 1935 shortly after Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh flew to Moscow, the idea was plucked out of limbo by 1958-59 cultural-exchange agreements. Then the talks were broken off after the Soviets shot down the U-2 in 1960. When the Russians released two captured RB-47 flyers as a gesture to the new Kennedy Administration, negotiations resumed, and the deal had even been tentatively struck when the Berlin Wall blocked it. The Cuban missile crisis and other tensions kept the talks down until last summer, when President Johnson decided to try again. Last week, despite an involuntary twitch resulting from the FBI's new spy case (see THE NATION), the agreement was signed in Washington by Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and Soviet Civil Aviation Minister Evgeny Loginov.

Agreed to Upgrade. The new deal calls for nonstop, round-trip flights between New York and Moscow, to be flown twice a week in the spring and summer, once a week in fall and winter, by both Pan American and Aeroflot, the U.S.S.R.'s huge government-owned airline. Service is expected to start next spring at about $550 for a roundtrip economy 21-day excursion. Pan Am will probably put Boeing 707s on the route. Aeroflot will most likely use the massive TU-114s that it flew last week in initiating an Aeroflot-Air Canada service between Moscow and Montreal. As part of the U.S.-Soviet terms, the Russians had to agree to upgrade baggage and passenger handling and other deficiencies at their end. This should work no great hardship since--in the face of an open passenger and pilot revolt--Aeroflot would probably have had to improve itself anyway.

In recent weeks Izvestla has reported "reproaches that are constantly coming in" about chronic delays, consistently bad service, inadequate airport amenities and lack of transportation to and from airports. Some pilots grumped that they were always having to explain to angry passengers why a half-day flight from Volgograd to Kamchatka took three days. Complained another: "I have seen passengers trudge to the plane up to their knees in mud because there was no transport." There is a lack of up-to-date navigational and mechanical equipment, concluded Pilot First Class V. Chekunin, "and as long as it is not available, passengers might just as well try to travel in rockets."

Inaugural Junket. Paying no public attention to the complaints, Aeroflot officials confidently predicted that 20,000 Americans would soon visit Russia annually and 20,000 Russians would head for the U.S., a good percentage of them aboard the ten-hour, 5,013-mile Pan Am and Aeroflot flights. While the 18,000 Americans who now annually visit Russia may increase somewhat, the number of traveling Russians will be nowhere near 20,000. Only 3,000 visited the U.S. last year, and almost all of them were in official parties.

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