Tupolev Tu-114-200

The Tu-114-200 was not a factory version but the second life of almost the entire fleet. Production Tu-114s left Kuibyshev with a cabin designed equally for airline service and state transport: 170 seats spread across three cabins, four sleeping compartments and a second cabin laid out as a restaurant, with tables and face-to-face seating. It was a luxury inherited from the days when the aircraft served as a showcase for the regime, but it sat awkwardly with Aeroflot's business: on domestic flights every seat was sold at the same price, since there were no classes in the USSR during the Tu-114's career, and the worst places, the six at each restaurant table, were the last to sell. With the boom in air travel and the race for capacity in the following decade, that dead space no longer made sense.

The rework consisted of removing the sleeping compartments and the restaurant and filling the space with conventional rows of seats, raising maximum capacity from 170 to 200 passengers. The English source dates it to the early 1970s and notes that it covered almost the whole fleet, apart from three or four aircraft that kept the original cabin; the Russian source agrees that virtually all aircraft were reconfigured during the 1970s. The conversion touched neither airframe nor engines: weight, range and performance remained those of the standard Tu-114, with its four NK-12MVs and 770 km/h cruise. It did coincide with another fleet-wide improvement: the last two production aircraft had been delivered with updated flight and navigation equipment, which was subsequently retrofitted to the rest of the fleet.

Individual conversions to the 200-seat layout preceded the general programme. The aircraft that had flown the Moscow to Tokyo route with Japan Air Lines in a two-class, 105-seat configuration returned in 1969 to the 200-seat domestic cabin when that service ended, and two of the three long-range Tu-114Ds, the Cuba airlift aircraft with only 60 seats and supplementary tanks, were brought to -200 standard in 1969 and 1970 once the Il-62 took over Havana. Conversely, Military Factory states that the Tu-114Ds were drawn "from the Tu-114-200 stock", a wording that does not fit the chronology given by the other sources and is recorded here only as a discrepancy.

The Tu-114-200 was, in effect, the Tu-114 of the second half of its career. With the Il-62 taking over the intercontinental routes, Delhi and Montreal in 1967, Tokyo and Havana in 1969, the reconfigured aircraft moved to the long domestic trunk routes from Domodedovo to Alma-Ata, Tashkent, Novosibirsk and Khabarovsk, where capacity mattered more than berths. GlobalSecurity sums up that period by saying the type was operated "in versions intended for 170 and 200 passengers", and the Russian source recalls that, even with the Il-62 established on long-haul work for more than ten years, the Tu-114 kept its reputation for reliability, speed and economy to the end.

The end came through fatigue rather than lack of demand. Airframe life had been set at 14,000 flying hours and most aircraft passed that mark in 1976; by then many were approaching 15,000 hours and showed cracks in the structural panels of the engine mountings. Aeroflot declined to repair aircraft already outclassed by the jet, and on 2 December 1976 CCCP-76485 closed passenger operations with a Domodedovo to Khabarovsk and back rotation. In the summer of 1977 21 aircraft were scrapped at once; a few continued with the Soviet Air Force until the early 1980s according to the Russian source, or until 1991 according to the English one. Two aircraft of the reconfigured fleet survive: CCCP-76490 at the civil aviation museum in Ulyanovsk and CCCP-76485 itself, the aircraft of the final flight, at the aviation college museum in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.