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High Fares. Aeroflot's fares are high: 11.3¢ a mile on flights inside Russia, v. the 8.6¢ charged by Western carriers for trips within Europe and only 5.3¢ 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.