Flights Across the Bering Strait: The Role of the Magadan Department of Civil Aviation and American Airlines in Organizing Air Communication between the USSR and the USA at the Turn of the 1980s–1990s

Abstract

The article deals with a question that has not been studied in central and regional historiog-raphy due to the scarcity and inaccessibility in the past of the source base about the beginning of flights to the USA by the Magadan Civil Aviation Administration and flights to the cities of the north-east of the USSR by American airlines. For the Kolyma aviators, such activity was new in everything, and entering the foreign market opened up other prospects for it. Considering that in the earlier period, all foreign air communications were carried out exclusively by Aeroflot represented by the Central Directorate of International Air Communications, the start of flights of the regional division was a posi-tive factor. The presence of airlines to Alaska has intensified contacts between scientists, educators, doctors, representatives of business circles and public figures of the two countries, which played an important role in establishing twinning relations between Magadan and Anchorage.