AEROFLOT

in full Aeroflot-Russian International Airlines, Russian airline that was formerly the national airline of the Soviet Union. The Soviet state airline was founded in 1928 under the name Dobroflot and was reorganized under the name Aeroflot in 1932. Dobroflot, or Dobrovolny Flot ("Volunteer Fleet"), the government-owned company created by the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, grew out of two former airlines: Dobrolyot ("Russian Volunteer Air Fleet"), founded in 1923, and Ukvozdukhput, or Ukrainian Airways, founded in 1925. These airlines together connected such cities as Moscow, Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa. After Dobroflot was reorganized as Aeroflot in 1932, progress was rapid; by 1935 its routes spanned the Soviet Union from Leningrad (St. Petersburg) to Vladivostok, with a network also extending southward to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Aeroflot, as suggested by its official name, "Main Civil Air Fleet Administration," was responsible for all civil aviation in the Soviet Union. It flew all international and domestic routes in the country, and, in addition to transporting passengers and freight, it was responsible for such operations as crop-spraying, aerial surveying, airborne rescue work, and flying ambulance services. Aeroflot used only aircraft made in the Soviet Union. It began the world's first civilian jet air service in 1956 (using Soviet Tu-104 aircraft) and helped develop the world's first supersonic airliner, the Soviet Tu-144, which first flew in 1968. By the late 1980s Aeroflot's fleet of 1,300 airliners and several thousand smaller planes were serving 3,600 cities and towns in the Soviet Union and flying international routes to more than 100 countries. By 1990, when Aeroflot carried a total of 138 million passengers, it was the world's largest airline, with about 15 percent of all civil air traffic. It flew to all continents, including, on occasion, Antarctica. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Aeroflot became the state-owned airline of the new Russian federation. Shrinking drastically, it lost its monopoly of civil air traffic, and most of its domestic routes were taken over by a host of new, smaller, regional airlines in Russia and other former Soviet republics. Aeroflot kept most of Russia's international routes, though even these were open to competition. The airline was renamed Aeroflot-Russian International Airlines.