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Background: Ten years ago the world's first jet passenger airliner TU-104, designed by Dr. Andrei Topolov took off from a Moscow airport.

To mark the ten years, Moscow's international Sheremetyevo airport held a news-conference for Soviet and foreign journalists. The Soviet Minister for Civil Airlines, Mr. Yevgheny Loghinov, said that the TU-104 planes carried twenty-eight million passengers while their ton-per-kilometre performance has reached six thousand seven hundred million.

The Soviet Airlines - the world's largest - will add improved intercontinental turbo-jet Il-62, TU-134, TU-154, YAK-40, Work is going on to prepare blueprints for a supersonic TU-144.

The Soviet Airlines now have agreements with fifty nations. TU-104, Il-18, AN-10 and TU-114 are flying to thirty-eight nations. New airways are to be launched in Central Africa and South America.

The journalists who attended the new-conference made a jubilee flight to Leningrad and back.