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It is just a short remark on a request I got the other day. A gentleman from Brasilia (! - in a comment to this post) asked me if I had images of the Tu-104 ‘in Aeroflot´s early livery’.

Here’s what I’ve been able to find in my own resources:

Tu-104s and Il-18s on the ramp at Tolmachevo, the main airport for the Novosibirsk city.

As I wrote before, my second cousin Yuri used to fly this type for a few years after he accomplished a short term contract in Soviet Air Force flying the Tu-104’s military prototype Tu-16 ‘Badger. Guess, transition training was no problem

I also scanned two old photographs..

..and by a pure chance found something interesting with regard to the above photo.

This photograph is showing passengers getting off the plane, Tu-104 reg. ‘CCCP-Л5412‘ at the Vnukovo airport, Moscow. It’s amazing what has come up after I googled the aircraft ID - as a matter of fact, this ‘CCCP-Л5412‘ was put on the pedestal as a memorial plane in front of the Vnukovo airport main terminal, and rested there for many years. I saw this plane like tons of times - actually, any time I would happen to be at Vnukovo (and the number of those is ‘countless ). But of course, I didn’t remember the plane’s registration, for I never paid much attention to it.

By the way, recently there was another twist in the ‘CCCP-Л5412’s ‘biography’ - it was removed from its habitual ‘eternal parking’ at Vnukovo, and relocated to another place. I tried to search other resources, and, for example, Airliners.net yielded abundant imagery of the ‘plane in concern‘.

Another surprise: THIS IMAGE in THE BUNCH was taken by a guy who let us use an image of ‘our baby’ -’RA-85123‘.

Let me introduce - Andrei Pechenkin, and HIS PHOTOS ON THE AIRLINERS.NET

And, finally - one more ‘vintage Soviet photograph’:

Tu-104s are in a maintenance hangar.

Note, the format of the aircraft registration is now different, which reveals the photo was taken later than that one of ‘CCCP-Л5412‘: it is now ‘CCCP-‘ with 5-digit registration number (’CCCP-42369‘). Earlier, the Soviet airliners had ‘CCCP- followed by ‘Л‘ (Cyrillic character for ‘L‘), and 4-digit number.

And one more piece of ‘Soviet aviation trivia’: later on the same ‘42.. ‘ type designator was assigned to the Yakovlev-42. (All Tu-154, for instance, have registrations starting from ‘RA-85xxx‘) Also, after the Soviet Union collapse all aircraft retained the same individual numbers, but the ‘CCCP’ was changed to ‘RA’ stating for ‘Russian Federation’.