OREANDA-NEWS. May 04, 2009. The airplane is Aeroflot’s gift to Tsander’s Club of Young Pilots (Riga International Airport, Latvia) to be used as a museum piece and an aid in the young pilots’ training, reported the press-centre of Aeroflot.

After Aeroflot withdrew Tu-134 aircrafts from operation at the end of 2007, the director of Tsander’s Club of Young Pilots asked the company’s administration to sell one of the aircrafts for a token payment of 1 EUR. Tsander’s Club of Young Pilots has a training base at the Aviation Museum (the Riga Airport), one of the oldest in the Baltic countries.

The administration of JSC Aeroflot Russian Airlines decided to hand Tu-134A-3NRA-65717 over to Riga’s Aviation Museum, as a tribute to the civil aviation vets living in Latvia, and for the sake of promoting friendship and mutual understanding between the Russian and Latvian people.

Aeroflot Air Technical Complex (ATC) and specialists from the State Research Institute of Civil Aviation worked together to evaluate the aircraft technical state, obtain the permission to fly from Moscow to Riga, and prepared the plane for the flight. The aircraft was flown by test pilots from the State Research Institute of Civil Aviation, with the Hero of the Russian Federation Ruben Yesayan as pilot-in-command.

The Tu-134A-3 was built at Khoresm Aviation Production Enterprise in 1981. It has lived through six repairs, the last one at Civil Aviation Plant N412. Over its operational life, the plane has flown 40,611 hours and made 19,976 flights, including flights to Riga, Latvia’s capital. The last flight was made in December 2007.

Tu-134 is a short-haul passenger airliner. Since its launch into operation, it flew Aeroflot passengers to practically every destinations in Western and Eastern Europe, except Madrid and Lisbon. The first international flight on a Tu-134 was made from Sheremetyevo, Moscow to Stockholm on September 12, 1967 by the crew of the pilot-in-command A.S. Gavrilov. In the late years, these aircrafts were operated on the Russian domestic lines, in the CIS countries, the Northern Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The main destinations of JSC Aeroflot Russian Airlines are St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Perm, Kyiv, Kaliningrad, Astrakhan, MinVody, Chelyabinsk, Ufa, Dnepropetrovsk, Riga, Samara, Sochi, Arkhangelsk, Naryan-Mar, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Tyumen, Kazan, Minsk, Simferopol. The popularity of Tu-134 owed to its easy operation and piloting, and sufficient comfort for passengers. The first foreign companies to purchase Tu-134 were the German “Interflug” and the Polish LOT (now Polish Airlines). The door to Europe was closed for Tu-134 when Article 3 of annex 16 of International Civil Aviation Association tightened the standards for noise and other emissions from aircrafts.

Over its history, Aeroflot has operated more than 600 Tu-134 aircrafts. The average number of passengers flown by Tu-134 airplanes is 7-9% of the total number of Aeroflot’s passengers. In the period of 1995-2007, Tu-134s carried 6.3 million passengers, 4 thousand tons за post and 18 thousand tons of cargo, on regular and charter flights. It was estimated that for the entire period when the company operated Tu-134s, these planes carried about 10 million passengers and over 30 thousand tons за post and cargo.

Over the period of their operation, hours flown by Aeroflot’s fleet of Tu-134s approximated to half a million, and the number of landings in airports of Russia and other countries to 250,000. The airplane showed itself highly dependable and practically failure-proof according to the К1000 reliability index. The entire history of Tu-134 operation by Aeroflot recorded no air disasters with these aircrafts, which evidences their high technical service quality.

Tu-134 Technical Characteristics:
Passenger Capacity  68 persons
Fuselage Diameter  2.9 м
Length -  37.1 м
Wingspan -  29.0 м
Height -  9.02 м
Maximum takeoff weight -  47.6 t
Commercial Load -  8.2 t
Cruise Speed -  850 – 900 km/h
Flying Range -  2,000 km