I'll leave the one about the Tu154 in the US East Coast to others. Suffice to say its crews were a long way from home ...
Originally Posted by Seat2A
Well, yes and no. The 154 never operated any domestic flights of course, but we used to see 154s in Anchorage. I don't recall the airline (Mavial Magadan Airlines?) but the flights routed once weekly Magadan-Petropavlosk-Anchorage. Would have been about 2004/5. I'm pretty sure there was another outfit that flew 154s down to Seattle. Not sure where the flights emanated from in Russia - Khabarovsk perhaps? - but they'd stop in Anchorage and then continue on to Seattle. Late 90s as I recall..
Among the others, in the late-1990s Aeroflot was running Vladivostok-Magadan/Petropavlovsk-Anchorage-Seattle, once a week via each of the alternate points. They didn't have a fleet in the Russian Far East so subcontracted it to Vladivostok Air with their Tu154s. Goodness knows what the aircraft titles were, they could have been VA, Aeroflot, or even still in the old Aeroflot livery which many Directorates carried on with without repainting. VA was one of the better run new companies, and some years ago Aeroflot actually bought it back. The various Aeroflot regional A320 flights around the region nowadays are actually just a reincarnation of this.
My hunch is that, with "appropriate" organisation, one could have got a US domestic leg on a Tu154 on Anchorage-Seattle on this. Nothing the FAA would have been aware of, you understand ... this is Russia
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Remember that Aeroflot used to operate an IL96 on Seattle-Moscow for some years as well, even when they had 767s in the fleet - I always thought this was deliberately to spite Boeing !