Crash of the IL-18

One of the showpieces of Aeroflot, the passenger-carrying offshoot of the Soviet air force, is a sleek turboprop called the Ilyushin-18. A four-engined, 405-m.p.h. plane that can carry up to 111 passengers nearly 3,000 miles without refueling, the

Il-18 is aeronautically more sophisticated than the Soviet's fuel-guzzling TU-104 jet, has far more commercial potential than the cumbersome turboprop giant TU-114. Unlike most Russian transports, its cabins seem to be properly pressurized, its furnishing spaciously luxurious; in flight, it is a smooth equal of comparable Western turboprops, the U.S. Lockheed Electra and Great Britain's Bristol Britannia.

Although used primarily on Russian domestic traffic, the II-18 serves on many of Aeroflot's beyond-the-curtain flights, has also been a favorite Soviet plane for special occasions where it might make the right kind of impression on the right kind of people. Five Il-18s on duty with the U.N.'s Congo airlift fleet are based in Ghana--and have so impressed Transport Minister Krobo Edusei that he wants to buy four at a rumored price of $1.4 million each. Pliably neutralist Afro-Asian nationalists have had free flights to Moscow in the craft, and the Congo's U.N. delegation was flown to the last Security Council meeting in New York in one.

But one grim day fortnight ago, an Il-18 on Aeroflot's weekly Cairo-Moscow run exploded in the air near Kiev killing 27 passengers and crewmen. Aeroflot seldom confesses to disasters within Russia's borders; this one was presumably announced since the dead included the members of a four-man Yemeni economic delegation and prominent nationalist leaders from Uganda and Algeria. Hard on the heels of the crash news, all Il-18s were grounded last week--a drastic measure that to Western experts suggested previous, unreported Il-18 crashes and the discovery of some serious structural flaw. As far as anyone in the West could recall, it was the first time the Soviets had ever admitted even by implication that anything was wrong with one of their planes.

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