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.