Even With All Its Troubles, Aeroflot Is Seeking a Bigger Piece of the Sky : Soviet Union: Despite crowding, confusion and delays in the wake of communism’s fall, airline aims to continue a major international expansion.

It’s past 2 a.m. and more than 300 passengers, many dozing open-mouthed, twist uncomfortably inside the suffocating Ilyushin-86 airbus, pride of the Aeroflot fleet.

Police officers file on and off the jumbo jet, listening to the complaints of shrieking Armenian women. It’s one of the most common problems in the post-Communist Soviet Union--too few seats on Aeroflot, the Soviet flag carrier and the world’s largest airline.

The Soviet Ministry of Aviation admits that hard-pressed Aeroflot, which flew 137 million passengers in its 2,524-plane fleet last year, leaves 20% of its riders stranded on the ground every day. Anyone waiting to go to Moscow knows that firsthand.

The Moscow-bound flight is now 17 hours behind schedule for the three-hour trip from the Armenian republic’s capital.

Armenian police order several dozen young men, who look Slavic and Russian, off the plane. The vacated seats, many without seat belts required by international regulations, are then filled by Armenians, weighed down with infants and bags of food, bootlegged cognac and boom boxes.

The jetliner finally roars into the night and climbs over the Caucasus Mountains, still washed in moonlight. The captain offers no apologies.

On Aeroflot, delays are as common as smiles are scarce. Flight attendants offer passengers a cup of sweetened water and quickly disappear.

“Please have some bread and shashlik ,” insists an English-speaking Armenian passenger. “We know Aeroflot taxes your soul.”

From his briefcase, the engineer produces warm flat bread, wrapped in a newspaper, and cold skewered meats. Other passengers have whole chickens, pungent sausages or an illegal nip of Armenian brandy.

The bedraggled passengers arrive to a gray Moscow dawn seemingly unaware that, for all its difficulties, Aeroflot has big plans to become a world-class airline.

“Business, especially international business, is booming,” Richard Swift, Aeroflot’s New York sales manager, says. “The more airplanes I can get, the more airplanes I can fill.”

Aeroflot officials say they will continue a major international expansion despite the breakup of the Soviet Union.

But in the crumbled nation, the airline’s managers face mounting confusion over who owns planes and routes.

Aeroflot’s Armenian branch already has launched direct Yerevan-to-New York service, using a leased jet from an American company and bypassing Aeroflot’s main base--and bottleneck--in Moscow.

So far this year, Aeroflot, with more than 100 international destinations, has begun new service from Moscow to Miami; San Francisco, Anchorage; Seoul; Jakarta, Indonesia, and Singapore.

The carrier has opened a Chicago office in preparation for service to the American Midwest and expects to begin flights to Israel soon.

Aeroflot is also working with British Airways to launch a new international carrier, Air Russia, which will compete with the world’s leading airlines.

British Airways plans to build an Air Russia terminal at Moscow’s domestic Domodedevo Airport and help finance an initial fleet of seven Boeing 767 long-range jetliners. Air Russia should be off the ground by 1994.

To boost its earnings of hard-to-get American dollars, Aeroflot, the world’s largest cargo carrier, has expanded international cargo operations, leasing some heavy-lift transports from the Soviet air force.

In New York, Aeroflot’s Swift says that tour operators looking for low fares and Soviet emigres paying in nearly worthless rubles are filling every seat on 20 flights a week to the United States.

“Whoever heard of an airline with a 100% load factor?” he asks.

Aeroflot’s New York hub handles eight flights a week from Moscow and St. Petersburg, plus one from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

Inside the chaotic Soviet Union, Aeroflot faces competition from at least six of its regional divisions. Besides the Armenian venture, Aeroflot divisions in the newly independent Baltic nations and Ukraine are seeking to set up their own airlines.

Officials in Moscow say it is unclear how Aeroflot crews, airplanes, ground-support staff and revenues will be divided among national and regional departments.

In Yerevan, where voters overwhelmingly supported Armenian independence this fall, local Aeroflot managers wage a daily war with Moscow to dispatch passenger planes to the republic. The new service to New York has intensified the conflict.

“Moscow wants us to remember who is in charge,” says an official of the mayor’s office, surveying the crowds which sometimes wait three days for a jet to arrive from the Soviet capital. “Aeroflot is Aeroflot.”