Soviet Jetliner Completes First Pacific Trip to U.S.
A Soviet jetliner, pioneering a new Pacific route linking the Soviet Far East and the West Coast of the United States, made its historic first flight Sunday but was late.
The inaugural flight from the Soviet city of Khabarovsk was 70 minutes behind schedule in arriving in Anchorage and more than three hours late departing for San Francisco.
Despite the delays, few of the passengers seemed to mind amid all the hoopla celebrating the first scheduled trans-Pacific flight between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Aeroflot Flight 327, a four-engine Ilyushin IL-62 carrying 134 passengers, left Khabarovsk on Sunday afternoon, flew across the International Date Line and arrived in Anchorage six hours later at 8:20 a.m. Sunday.
More than four hours later, the flight continued to San Francisco, a four-hour flight from Anchorage.
The flight came just 11 months after President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed an agreement establishing new air routes and permitting the U.S.-Soviet trans-Pacific flights.
Next month, Alaska Airlines begins flying three times a week for the summer to the Soviet Far East cities of Magadan and Khabarovsk.
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