Aeroflot

Aeroflot is one of the world's oldest existing airlines and established on February 23, 1923. The airline made its operations on July 15, 1923 with inaugural flight between Moscow and Nizhni Novgord. Aeroflot became the largest airline of the world in late 1930s and began international operations in 1937. With induction of Tupolev TU-104 jets in 1956, Aeroflot became the first airline in the world to operate regular jet airline services. During the Soviet era Aeroflot was national airline of Soviet and also crowned the position of world's largest airline. However, in 1992 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union Aeroflot divided into more than 300 regional airlines. At the meantime, Aeroflot replaced its old fleet of Russian manufactured Antonov, Ilyushin and Tupolev aircraft with modern Western aircraft. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Aeroflot took an Airbus A310-300 aircraft on lease that was first foreign aircraft of the airline. Further in 1994, Aeroflot took another foreign aircraft from Boeing family (Boeing 767 - 300ER). After the dissolution of the USSR, Aeroflot also transformed from a state-owned carrier to a semi-privatised enterprise. Aeroflot underwent many changes later on and become a member of SkyTeam in April 2006.