Originally Posted by
The SSK
Consequently Western airlines were obliged to pay ‘royalty payments’ to Aeroflot for the right not to make an intermediate call, in direct contravention of international air law.
This is still going on and currently costs the European airlines somewhere in the region of $300 million annually.
You can see a vestige of this in today's Aeroflot flights between Moscow and London. Most have flight numbers in the SU239-248 range. But two a week each way are numbered as SU581/2 (and the normal relationship between even/odd numbers and inbound/outbound flights is reversed). These are hangovers from the "Aeroflot London to Tokyo service" fiction, and allow Aeroflot to do two extra flights to London over and above the air service agreement between Britain and Russia. At the London end they appear in practice as nothing more than the other London to Moscow flights and use short-haul aircraft. The flight from Moscow to Tokyo on those days uses the same flight number, although operated by a 767, to maintain the story.