In the 1960s the Soviet Union had thousands of small airfields, and around a thousand of them were little more than grass strips under 700 metres long. The aircraft serving them were piston-engined relics: Lisunov Li-2s, Ilyushin Il-12s and Il-14s, slow, noisy and old.

Aeroflot wanted a turbine aircraft that could use those same fields in poor weather, with no ground equipment to speak of. The Yakovlev design bureau answered with something nobody else had tried at that size: a straight-winged regional jet with three engines. The Yak-40, NATO reporting name Codling, went on to sell more than 1,000 examples and even found buyers in Western Europe.

A Jet for the Grass Strips

The Yakovlev Yak-40 was designed backwards from the runway. Aeroflot's requirement did not ask for speed; it asked for safe, reliable operation from poorly equipped airports with short, unpaved runways of less than 700 metres (2,300 ft). Key.Aero's history of the type, drawing on Piotr Butowski, counts 2,980 Soviet airfields suitable for small airliners in the 1960s, about 1,000 of them grass strips under 700 metres.

Yakovlev studied turboprops and even vertical take-off designs with lift jets in the fuselage or in wing pods. It settled on a straight-winged trijet for 20 to 25 passengers, powered by the new AI-25 turbofan from Ivchenko in Zaporizhzhia.

Speed was explicitly not the priority. The brief was a jet that could get in and out of rough, short strips reliably, in bad weather, with almost nothing waiting on the ground, and almost every design decision that followed flowed from that.

Travel vlogger Noel Philips takes a passenger flight in a Yak-40.

Built to Need Nothing

Everything about the layout served self-sufficiency. Two AI-25s hang on short pylons on the rear fuselage and a third sits in the tail, fed through an S-duct from a dorsal intake. An auxiliary power unit lets the crew start the engines with no ground cart, and passengers board through ventral airstairs in the rear fuselage, so no steps are needed either.

The wing is unswept, with large slotted trailing-edge flaps but no leading-edge devices. Instead of complex high-lift systems, Yakovlev relied on a low wing loading to deliver short take-offs and landings. The wing runs as one structure from tip to tip and carries about 3,800 litres of fuel in integral tanks.

At the back, a large fin swept at 50 degrees moves the unswept tailplane rearwards to make up for the short rear fuselage. The pressurised cabin, 2.4 metres in diameter, normally seats 24 to 27 three-abreast, or up to 32 four-abreast. Early aircraft had no thrust reversers at all; Volandia notes a reverser on the centre engine of later examples.

From Saratov to 276 Towns

The first of five prototypes flew on 21 October 1966. Production began at the Saratov Aviation Plant in 1967, Soviet certification followed in 1968, and the Yak-40 flew its first Aeroflot passenger service on 30 September 1968.

It quickly became the backbone of Aeroflot's local network. By 1980 the type served 276 domestic destinations, and by 1993 Aeroflot's Yak-40s had carried 354 million passengers. Production ended in November 1981 with 1,011 or 1,013 aircraft built, depending on the source.

The aircraft kept evolving. A longer-range Yak-40D added fuel, the Yak-40K of 1975 to 1981 added a large cargo door for freight and combi work, and later aircraft gained detail changes such as one fewer cabin window on the right side.

Selling a Soviet Jet to the West

The Yak-40 was demonstrated in 75 countries, including the United States, and became the first Soviet aircraft certified in Italy and West Germany. In all, about 130 were exported, to customers from Afghanistan, Angola and Cuba to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Zambia.

Italy produced the most colourful sale. Aertirrena, a small Florence-based airline founded in 1966 by pilot and entrepreneur Giorgio Billi, bought Yak-40s in 1969 through an unusual barter: textile machinery from Billi's company in exchange for the jets, marketed by Aviaexport. Replacing the avionics with Western equipment and a lengthy certification process delayed scheduled services, and the airline ceased flying on 8 April 1974.

Aertirrena's aircraft passed to Avioligure, and Italy's Volandia museum lists five Yak-40s that served Italian airlines in the 1970s and 1980s, with Aertirrena, Alinord, Avioligure and Cadabo.

West Germany's story ran in parallel. General Air Nord, set up in 1972 by former staff of the Hamburg carrier General Air, added Yak-40s and linked Saarbrücken with Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne-Bonn and Munich. Wikipedia describes it as the Western operator with the largest number of the type. Its successor, General Air Luftverkehrs, stopped flying in October 1975, and the Yak-40s went back to the Soviet Union at the end of that year.

Proposals to give the jet Western engines went further. A Yak-40L with two Lycoming LF507 turbofans was studied as a joint programme with Textron Lycoming, and a three-engined Yak-40TL was proposed, but neither reached production.

VIPs and Flying Laboratories

In military hands the Yak-40 served, among other roles, as a VIP transport. The Korean People's Army Air Force ordered 11 in 1978 for VIP transport, delivered in 1980. The Fuerza Aérea Polaca also flew the type.

Soviet designers turned others into flying laboratories. Variants included the Yak-40-25 with a MiG-25R nose and electronic intelligence equipment, the Yak-40 Fobos with dorsal viewing domes, the Yak-40REO with a ventral infrared linescan canoe, and weather research aircraft fitted with sensors and dispensers.

A Czech Air Force Yak-40 takes off from Geneva.

Military service has now come to an end. FlightGlobal's World Air Forces 2026 directory, published in late 2025, listed no Yak-40s in service with any air force.

The Last of the Codlings

Civil survivors are dwindling too. As of July 2019, only 22 of the 1,011 aircraft were still with civil operators, most of them converted to VIP charter layouts, with fewer than ten in scheduled passenger service.

Museums are filling the gap. Volandia, near Milan Malpensa, displays a Yak-40 that flew for Aeroflot from 1973 to 1997 before joining the Liberian register for the Italian operator Ales Airlines. Grounded in 2000 after only 7,000 flight hours when the airline collapsed, it sat at Milan Linate for years before going on show in November 2019.

The design also left a family line. Yakovlev's larger Yak-42 is listed as a related development, while Wikipedia lists the Fokker F28 and the VFW-Fokker 614 as Western aircraft of comparable role, configuration and era. Neither was shaped by a brief like Aeroflot's, which started from the grass strip and worked upwards to the aeroplane.

The Yak-40 has even become a testbed for a different future: in July 2021 one began trials with an electric propeller motor fitted in its nose. For a jet designed to need nothing from the airfields it served, it is a fitting last job.

A Severstal Yak-40 starts its three AI-25s, taxis and departs Moscow Vnukovo.

Sources: Wikipedia (Yakovlev Yak-40, Aertirrena, General Air), Volandia Park and Museum of Flight, Key.Aero