Biggest, But Hardly Best

The 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 in 1977.

How bad is 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, the largest U.S. carrier--roughly twice the number carried by all major Western European lines combined.

Sleepy Resignation. Handicapped by frequent foul weather over many of its domestic routes, Aeroflot provides needed transportation in a vast country where 70% of the roads are impassable during the spring thaw. Fares are cheap: only $18.23 to fly the 400 or so miles from Moscow to Leningrad (comparable fare in the U.S.: New York-Cleveland, $56). Travelers, however, are all too familiar with the price for Aeroflot's convenience: overbooking and canceled flights. Airports often resemble dormitories as hundreds of people slump in sleepy resignation, sometimes for days, without adequate dining facilities.

A local newspaper has complained that Moscow's Domodedovo airport --one of four in the Soviet capital--is a marvel of inefficiency where travelers are often greeted with the refrain, "No space, comrades. The aircraft aren't made of rubber, you know." Aeroflot stewardesses seem to be chosen for neither beauty nor efficiency. Refreshments are often limited to candy distributed before takeoff.

Most disturbing, Aeroflot's safety record has been bad enough to prompt the Soviet civil aviation ministry to complain three years ago of inadequate training and negligent checking of equipment. Since then there has been some improvement. Aeroflot pilots used to be notorious for wandering off the flight path at London's Heathrow Airport. Today they seldom do, perhaps because of Moscow's regular post-international-flight review of cockpit tapes recording pilot procedures.

Meanwhile, though, the dispute between Aeroflot and Pan Am threatens a disruption of U.S.-Soviet air travel. The prospective bonanza that the 1980 Moscow Olympics offer to both lines would seem to dictate a compromise, but it will not be helped by an exchange of nationalistic incidents earlier this year. A few days after an Aeroflot official in Washington was arrested on a charge of drunken driving, a Pan Am employee in Moscow was accused by Soviet police of the same offense--even though he was cold sober. His case is still pending, presumably awaiting the outcome of the case against the Russian.

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