Word: aeroflot
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...story was decidedly downplayed: ten lines on the back page of Pravda, under the innocuous headline ANNOUNCEMENT. But the news was dramatic: a TU-104 turbojet of Aeroflot, the Soviet state airline, crashed last week after taking off from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on a flight to Leningrad. Readers did not learn how many people died (Western estimates range from 52 to 72), nor were they told that it was the fifth major Aeroflot crash this year. Still, the announcement was rare confirmation that the world's largest, least-known airline is far from perfect...
Safety is not its only problem. This week the U.S. Government will clamp down on Aeroflot's freedom to sell tickets in the U.S. The reason: though Aeroflot has a reciprocal agreement with Pan American, Soviet officials have made it difficult if not impossible for their citizens to get Pan Am tickets for Moscow-New York flights. Adding to Aeroflot's embarrassments, its chiefs have had to announce that the Soviets' new supersonic jetliner, the 1,430-m.p.h. TU-144, will not begin passenger service this year as scheduled; Westerners doubt it will be flying even...
...Aeroflot? It can hardly be judged by the standards of a Western airline. The state-owned enterprise is the main provider of civilian air transport in the U.S.S.R. It ferries food supplies to oilmen on offshore rigs, sprays crops in the Ukraine, and keeps an eye on volcanoes on the Kamchatka peninsula. Even in its conventional passenger service, Aeroflot, with airports in 3,500 Soviet cities and towns and links to 70 foreign countries, from Peru to Benin, operates on a scale no other line can match. It carries more than twice as many passengers as United Air Lines...
Dodging Amsterdam's closely watched Schiphol Airport, couriers detour to Zurich, Frankfurt, Rome and other cities and then carry the dope to Holland overland. Penny-wise smugglers have even used Aeroflot's discount flights across Asia, though Soviet police crackdowns in Moscow are making that route more dangerous. Tactics change daily. "You know if we see a Chinese get off a flight from Bangkok, we're going to nail him," says one Paris-based U.S. narc. To avoid that, the triads are recruiting middle-class Caucasians as "mules" for $1,000 a trip plus plane fare...
...Aeroflot Flight No. SU 229 prepared to take off from Moscow to Amsterdam last week, Russian Writer Andrei Amalrik tucked his Siamese cat Disa under his arm while his artist wife Gyusel accepted a farewell bouquet of red peonies. KGB agents darted in and out of the small crowd assembled at Sheremetyevo Airport, snapping pictures of the couple taking leave of their desolate friends...