By ANDREW E. KRAMER


MOSCOW - Aeroflot’s symbol is still the winged hammer and sickle, but otherwise, the former communist carrier has mostly shrugged off its Soviet past. The strongest evidence yet: by the end of the year, it will fly a fleet nearly entirely made in the U.S.A. and Western Europe.

Aeroflot is selling all of its Tupolev jets, the workhorse passenger aircraft of the former East Bloc. Once they are gone, only six of about 100 jets in Aeroflot’s fleet will be Russian-made. And those planes, Il-96s, will fly within Russia and on select foreign flights, including the Moscow-Havana and Moscow-Hanoi routes.

That Aeroflot will fly almost exclusively Boeing and Airbus jets is a remarkable turn for a company that once owned virtually every civilian airplane in the Soviet Union. But the airline has tried to reinvent itself as a business carrier, and its passengers tend to prefer Western airplanes.

While experts say Russian airplanes are well-constructed, poor maintenance and repairs brought them a bad reputation for safety after the Soviet collapse. And as any passenger will tell you, they are also noisy and cramped.

“I look at every bolt and every screw and wonder if any are loose, and I worry,” Anastasia A. Tkachova, a student flying to London on Aeroflot, said while awaiting a flight at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.

“It’s more comfortable to fly an Airbus,” another passenger, Mikhail A. Kotlyarov, said. But he was quick to add, with a touch of regret, “Russia will be left without its own airplanes.”

Not exactly. In fact, despite Aeroflot’s move, Russia’s domestic jet industry actually appears to be making an improbable comeback.

It was the Russian-made planes’ far greater fuel consumption that doomed them with Aeroflot. Aeroflot’s chief executive, Vitaly Savelyev, said that the company was losing money on about 40 percent of its routes and that it would have to lay off about 6,000 workers in the coming two or three years, the Vedomosti business newspaper reported recently.

Over its history, of course, Aeroflot has had myriad problems. Horror stories abound, though statistically flying was as safe here as in the West until a series of recent crashes involving both Western- and Russian-made jets, accidents blamed mostly on pilot error.

Irina Danenberg, Aeroflot’s spokeswoman, said Aeroflot was selling its Tu- 154 jets because they burned so much fuel compared with Western planes, not because of safety concerns.

The Soviet legacy is “completely irrelevant” today, Nikolai Kovarsky, a Moscow- based business consultant, said of Aeroflot. “They’re extremely friendly, extremely professional. The service is impeccable. And they’re Russian.”

Aerospace is among the few competitive sectors of Russia’s economy outside petroleum. The absence of modern planes is not a reflection of the current state of the industry but of the postcollapse crisis of the 1990s - the lead time is long on new plane designs.

Boris Bychkov, the general director of the Moscow office of Airclaims, the aviation consultancy, said that the disappearance of the Tupolevs from Aeroflot’s fleet should not be seen as a “blow to the image” of Russian plane makers. “We still have excellent fighter jets,” he said.


Aeroflot is selling its Russian-made Tu-154 jets, which burn too much fuel.