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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 2123.PDF
924 FLIGHT International, 5 December 1963 Aeroflot Uzbekistan division fight crew prepares for the morning 11-18 service from Tashkent to Moscow Airline Profile / NUMBER ELEVEN IN THE SERIES AEROFLOT By Clive Jenkins Mr Jenkins is general secretary of the Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians. In 1957 he visited the Soviet Union and reported exclusively for "Flight" on the work and plans of Aeroflot. He has recently returned from a fresh look at the Soviet airline which included travelling 10,000 miles along its routes. AEROFLOT is the Civil Air Fleet of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Its head, General-Colonel E. F. Loginov, is its chief administrative officer and has the status of a minister. His first deputy, General-Colonel G. S. Shetchikov, runs the airline in his absence, attends check-up meetings of the Council of Ministers and is also, in a remarkable change of policy since 1957, a member of the Civil Aviation Workers Union which recently elected him to its Central Committee. One decision of the twenty-second congress of the Communist party was that civil aviation "shall be made a general means of passenger transport in every district of the whole land." How much progress is being made? The indices of growth are impressive. In 1958 there were 8m passenger journeys; in 1959 there were 12.5m. The estimate for 1963 is more than 35m and services to 30 countries. Gen Shetchikov told me: "In capacity ton-miles we are already 420 per cent up Tu-KMA maintenance at Moscow Vnukuvo Airport over 1958 and expect to be 600 per cent up by the end of our five- year plan in 1965. At the moment we are slightly ahead of our target but it is going in jumps. In some years we have had 30-35 per cent cumulative annual increase but this will slow down to 24-25 per cent next year." In 1957 I estimated that Aeroflot employed 220,000 people on what we would consider to be purely airline work plus airport management and met services. I now believe that this was probably over-estimated by about 20,000. But current membership figure of the aviation workers union (which has smaller sections employed in flying clubs and certain civilian duties in connection with military installations) is now almost 500,000. It seems probable that almost 400,000 of these now work for Aeroflot although Gen Shetchikov was only prepared to concede "several hundred thousand." The tremendous rate of growth is about to be accelerated. In 1964 air fares will be reduced, on average, by about 35 per cent throughout the Soviet Union with larger decreases coming on the long-distance routes, e.g., Khabarovsk - Moscow or Khabarovsk - Sochi. There is obviously an official desire to link the Far Eastern and Central Asian Republics much more quickly and intimately with the European areas of the country, the central administrative and technical agencies and the holiday resorts of the Black Sea and the Crimea. As a result Soviet air fares, for the first time, will be less than the rail fares in many cases (they are currently slightly higher). All these developments are dealt with by the Aeroflot central board which meets weekly at its head office in Moscow near R^ Square. Under Gen Loginov and Shetchikov come the following board members:— General-Major V. F. Bashakirov, operations and traffic; I. y Antonov, chief engineer; N. K. Assovsky, head of training; N. *• Ochnev, personnel recruitment; D. I. Osipov, new (acfaniQu*j technical purchasing, forward planning and stocking, researcn co-ordination (a new post, called for by the technical reconstruction of Aeroflot since 1957); G. I. Stolarev, director of construction; General-Major V. I. Vasaliev, chief inspector; P. N. ChuiK°v> passenger handling, advertising and commercial exploitation- In addition there is a special department of international anatfs headed by V. N. Danilychev. Gen Zaharov has been made head oi the Aeroflot Scientific Research Institute in Moscow which wlder"
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