WHBM

I think Balkan was the first. The Eastern European airlines at the time, around 1970, carried very few passengers, just favoured diplomats and some state industry business travellers between one another's countries, and they had already stocked up with the smaller Tu134, many routes just running a couple of times a week. The long domestic city-to-city runs of the Soviet Union that the Tu154 suited were not present in their market.

Some of the first Balkan runs with them, however, were summertime holiday flights to various UK airports from the Bulgarian Black Sea holiday points of Bourgas and Varna. Up to four or five used to turn up each weekend, to points like Newcastle, Glasgow, East Midlands, Cardiff, and others. They had a strange operating pattern, they would do all the runs from Bourgas on Saturday, each aircraft managing two round trips in the day, then the whole lot would position overnight to Varna and do the same thing from there on Sunday. All the hotels in Bourgas changed over their holiday clients on Saturday, and all the ones in Varna on Sunday.

Something must have put CAAC in China off the Tu154 initially, leading to them buying Tridents from the UK instead.

Also in early days, a notable buyer was Egyptair. They got a big batch of eight all together, but during the initial training by Soviet crews had a crash which made them abandon the type and send them all back again, where they eventually entered service with Aeroflot. Egypt at the time bought a large number of military aircraft from the Soviets. I believe they did appear in printed timetables, but never actually made it into passenger service.

I always enjoyed my Tu154 trips, the more modern ones were notably pleasant to ride in.