Yakovlev Yak-40 Yak-40 Salon

Two qualities made the Yak-40 attractive to governments: it could use airports closed to larger jets, and it needed neither an airbridge nor a ground start cart. A salon version was therefore offered early, built alongside the airline models, with a compartmented interior and the equipment for long representative flights.

Russian sources distinguish two interior standards. The first spreads eleven seats over two lounges divided by a washroom and wardrobe block, with a galley, a second washroom and a further wardrobe in the tail. The second gathers sixteen or twenty seats in a single lounge. Both drop the airliner's three-abreast row and change the trim, the sound insulation and the service equipment.

At 83 aircraft the salon is one of the largest sub-series of the whole programme, far ahead of the single-airframe flying laboratories. Many went to air forces and governments — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Equatorial Guinea — and to North Korea, which ordered eleven in 1978 and took delivery in 1980 for leadership transport and short diplomatic trips.

Once the Yak-40 stopped paying its way on scheduled routes, the Russian corporate market took it up for its low purchase price and its access to secondary airfields. In 1996 the Smolensk plant organised a systematic executive refit: radios for international routes, a business-class cabin and polyurethane exterior paint. Most of the aircraft still flying at the end of the 2010s were fitted out this way.