The Tupolev 154 is a Soviet-era workhorse that challenged the sufferance of Aeroflot’s long-haul passengers more than it did their pockets.
There are people of a certain age who will recall the Tupolev 154 with the kind of fondness more usually consequent to the magical workings of nostalgia. With the Ilyushin 62, it formed the backbone of Aeroflot and other East European airline fleets during the last two decades of the Cold War.
More than 1,000 Tupolev 154s were built. The aircraft flew medium- and long-haul routes, its range of up to 3,300 miles giving it around five hours’ flying time: enough to transport 130-odd passengers to most parts of the world, with a stop or three.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet government introduced a policy of fare reductions. Not only did this bring flying into the same price bracket as railways for domestic passengers, it also made Aeroflot, the USSR’s national airline, a highly attractive proposition for budget conscious long-haul travellers – at least, from a price perspective. From the 1960s, Aeroflot’s growth was little short of spectacular and the addition of the Tupolev 154 to its fleet in 1972 coincided with a rapid increase in international travel around the world. For the first time, long-haul air travel became accessible to average people with average incomes; it opened up a world of affordable possibilities. Migrants could visit their families more than once every ten years. Hippies could seek freedom, peace and enlightenment without having to buy a second-hand Volkswagen van. And young people could do self-funded voluntary work in unimaginably remote and exotic places.
A symbiotic relationship between the budget traveller and the Soviet economy developed. For Aeroflot, it was an opportunity to service over 80 countries economically – many, of course, had strategic and political links with the Soviet Union. It also had its propaganda uses and brought in valuable foreign currency. By 1980, Aeroflot had become the world’s largest airline, transporting more than one in seven of all air passengers worldwide.
Affordability, though, came at the expense of comfort. Neither Aeroflot nor the Tupolev 154 was oriented – at all – to passenger welfare. The vast majority of routes required a change in Moscow, where layovers could be painfully long. The city’s Sheremetyevo-2 airport, built for the 1980 Olympics, was a major improvement over Domodedovo airport, but still lacked facilities to keep passengers occupied for those long hours.
If the transit was less than 10 hours, there was no choice but to remain in the airport. Sometimes, you’d be given a coupon for a meal in the restaurant on the first floor. Mike Allenby was a one-time regular Aeroflot passenger and recalls his first transit at Sheremetyevo.
“It had taken twelve hours and a couple of stops to reach Moscow from India and I was stuck there for another eight hours. After the meal I decided to go for a walk. I discovered a small lounge with a ‘Closed’ sign on the door, which I ignored. It was located discreetly away from the main passenger thoroughfares and was furnished with several deep, comfortable armchairs.
“There was a bookshelf full of tomes on the greatness of the Soviet endeavour. I took one. It was about the heroic construction of a hydro-electric dam in the Urals. I sunk into an armchair, opened the book and soon fell into a deep, restful sleep.
“Sometime later, I woke with a start as the door opened and a stout, uniformed woman walked in. She was as surprised to see me as I was to see her. She swallowed hard, then demanded to know what I thought I was doing there. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to explain that I was enjoying the book about dam construction and held it up for her to see. For a moment she seemed unsure of what to do, as though asking herself what anyone in their right mind would find interesting about that, then said that I could remain there – but (index finger aloft) only until I had finished reading that book. And be sure to turn the lights off when leaving. Then, with an abrupt about turn, she was gone.”
If the transit time exceeded 10 hours, passengers were bussed to the Aeroflot Hotel, close to the airport in the midst of dense and often snow-covered forest that gave the impression of an isolated place of internment. If you were lucky and sufficiently compos mentis, you’d get taken on a tour of Moscow.
The Tupolev 154 is, by any standards, a noisy aeroplane. Designed in the image of the earlier British Aerospace Trident and the Boeing 727, its three rear-mounted engines produced a distinctively piercing bellow as they lifted their payload into the air. Despite later attempts to make them quieter, that noise helped ensure that the Tupolev 154 was banned from European and other Western airports. Its poor safety record didn’t help – and as recently as April 2010, a Tupolev 154 carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashed near Smolensk, killing all aboard.
The cabin was peculiarly oval, giving it a low ceiling and tiny overhead baggage compartments. It was not immune to the engine noise, which translated inside into a deeply penetrating, whining roar during take-off and landing.
For many years, Aeroflot used an especially potent substance to flush the Tupolev 154’s toilets, as Geoff Peters recalls.
“A few minutes into the flight, the man next to me got up to use the washroom. When he returned, he brought with him a most peculiar odour that made me think he’d had an accident. It was only when I went to the toilet some time later that I realised the injustice of that assumption; that the culprit was in fact the disinfectant, a deep blue liquid whose noxious vapour impregnated your clothes and stayed there even after the flight.”
On long-haul routes, the Tupolev 154 had to make at least one refuelling stop. Tashkent, in eastern Uzbekistan, was a favourite on flights to Asia. Passengers would be de-planed, given a dog-eared plastic transit card, and sent into a large hall in the terminal building, which was empty but for self-service trolleys loaded with glasses of sweet apple juice. On African routes, Tripoli was a frequent stop of choice, which sometimes surprised passengers. Ken Palmer was a travel agent in the 1980s who once booked a couple of American backpackers on an Aeroflot flight to Ghana.
“This was just after the US had bombed Libya and there was an urgent phone call from them. They were at Heathrow and in a major panic, because they’d just found out that their flight from Moscow was scheduled to stop for refuelling in Tripoli. They almost screamed down the phone, saying that I would have to get them released if they were arrested and imprisoned there. Fortunately, we managed to book them on another flight later that day.”
Apart from the occasional, but invariably one-sided, battle of wits between a disgruntled passenger and the authoritarian cabin crew, the Tupolev 154 offered no in-flight entertainment. Meals would often include a kind of large, orange-coloured caviar. They were always accompanied by a choice of splendid Georgian wines, and glasses were refilled regularly and generously in what may have been a charitable attempt to make passengers sleep through the flight.
Today’s Aeroflot is, of course, a different beast altogether. It operates a young and modern fleet of Boeings and Airbuses, with the Ilyushin 96 its only Russian-built aircraft. Gone are the days of ultra-cheap Aeroflot tickets. Gone, too, is the Tupolev 154, which completed its last flight for Aeroflot in December 2009, although it remains in service with some other airlines. And gone, mercifully, is the kind of mind-dulling, bum-numbing journey on multiple Tupolev 154s that once took this erstwhile volunteer 42 hours and six stops to get from Calcutta to London.