Largest airline ever

As the official state airline of the former USSR, the present-day Russian carrier Aeroflot, was the largest airline of all time. In the last complete year of the USSR's formal existence (1990) it employed 600,000 - at that time more than the top 18 US airlines put together - and flew 139 million passengers with 20,000 pilots, along 1,000,000km (620,000 miles) of domestic routes across 11 time zones. By comparison, the largest current carrier of passengers, Delta Air Lines, has a staff of around 81,000.