Why were people transported to the boarding gate by trucks with trailers at Soviet airports?

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In the 70s-90s of the last century, large square passenger semi-trailers on ZIL or KAZ tractor units transported people to the boarding ramp at Soviet airports.

RBC-Ukraine Auto journalists told how these passenger semi-trailers appeared, and why platform buses were not used in Soviet airports.

The first platform buses in the USSR

In the 50s and 60s years, with the advent of mass regional and long-haul aviation in the USSR, the question of transport for transporting passengers to the aircraft ramp became acute.

This task was set before the specially created RAF-980 buses with passenger trailers on the RAF-977 chassis. The road train with a tractor and two trailers had 64 seats. At the same time, the maximum speed of the trains was 15 km/h.

The open passenger compartment was thoroughly blown by all the winds and weakly protected against torrential rains. In addition, soon there was a lack of capacity.

APPA-4 passenger semi-trailers

At the beginning of the 1970s, the RAF-980 was replaced by APPA, which stood for “Airport passenger platform train”. and the number indicated the number of doors in the semi-trailer.

It was believed that one semi-trailer could accommodate up to 120 people. Benches for 16-20 seated passengers were attached to the sides of the body. The door had the widest opening in the entire nomenclature of Soviet transport and was 1400 mm.

The speed of the semi-trailer was limited to 25 km/h. The suspension of the single axle of the trailer received an air suspension with variable trailer clearance, as well as shock absorbers from the MAZ-500 truck.

Since the utilization ratio of the KAZ-608 and ZIL-130V1 semi-trailer tractors that towed them increased, the need to use new equipment disappeared . Annually, the Riga plant produced about 45 passenger semi-trailers.

What happened to airport semi-trailers

At the beginning of the 80s, there were even more passengers and the model used could not cope with the number of passengers. To service one large plane, 2-3 trucks with a trailer had to be fitted.

Designers developed several modifications of APPA, but in the second half of the 80s the situation changed again – the number of air passengers fell.

In In the 1990s, many APPA-4 semi-trailers were worn out, and large airports in the post-Soviet space were already thinking about updating the fleet of platform vehicles. Many people started buying used vehicles from Europe. Later, already in our century, LAZ and MAZ developed their own platform buses.

It is noteworthy that several such cars are still on the balance sheet at Kyiv airport, undergoing regular maintenance. Until recently, they were used to transport passengers on peak days. In addition, APPA-4 can occasionally be found on the removal of large cemeteries, as well as large enterprises.