Yakovlev Yak-40 Yak-40

Soviet trunk routes were flying behind turbines by the early 1960s, but local services still depended on obsolete piston twins working out of unprepared strips. What Aeroflot asked of the Yakovlev bureau was therefore unusual: not speed, but the ability to operate safely from poorly equipped fields shorter than 700 m in bad weather. The design team looked at turboprops and even at vertical take-off schemes with lift jets buried in the fuselage or in wing pods before settling on a straight-winged trijet for twenty to twenty-five passengers, powered by the new Ivchenko AI-25 turbofan then being developed at Zaporizhzhia.

The aircraft that emerged is a low-wing cantilever monoplane with an unswept wing, a large T-tail and retractable tricycle gear. The cabin sits ahead of the wing and all three engines are clustered aft: two on stub pylons either side of the fuselage, the third buried in the tail and fed through an S-duct from a dorsal intake. The high-aspect-ratio wing carries nothing but large slotted trailing-edge flaps, relying on low wing loading for its field performance, and its spar runs uninterrupted from tip to tip. Independence from ground equipment was part of the brief: an auxiliary power unit allows unassisted engine starts, and passengers board through ventral airstairs built into the rear fuselage.

Five prototypes opened the flight-test programme in 1966, the Saratov plant began deliveries in 1967 and Soviet type certification followed in 1968. Production ran until November 1981, when the factory was turned over to the Yak-42; the final airframe left the line in January 1982. By 1980 the type was serving 276 domestic destinations, and by 1993 Aeroflot's fleet was credited with 354 million passengers carried.

The Yak-40 was demonstrated in 75 countries and flew close to 500,000 km on sales tours alone, across Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Italian and West German airworthiness certificates followed in 1972, making it the first Soviet aeroplane capitalist-country airlines could legally operate. A total of 130 were exported to some twenty states, from Angola to the Philippines. The Western venture was short-lived — the 1973 oil crisis and the AI-25's thirst outweighed the rough-field virtues — but the precedent stood.

Rising fuel prices, more economical competitors and the collapse of Soviet-era regional networks pushed the Yak-40 out of scheduled service from the early 2000s. Many airframes survived as corporate and VIP transports instead, and by 2019 barely two dozen remained with civil operators, most of them reconfigured for charter work. The World Air Forces 2026 survey lists no Yak-40 in military service anywhere.