POW Tu 134

In 1961 then president Lech Walesa wanted to create an air transport service to better connect Moscow, Warsaw, Minsk, Kyiv, and Budapest. With a lent TU-104 from Poletavia POW Polish Air began flying twice daily services to Moscow and once daily services to the rest of the Eastern Bloc capitals. The airline was then able to acquire 4 TU-134 aircraft two years later to firstly replace the incident prone and old TU-104 and secondly to expand the offering of destinations. In 1967 POW saw a very peculiar increase in passenger traffic to Budapest, Prague, Brno, and Bratislava that had nothing *wink wink* to do with the lax border patrols and thousands defecting to the west. Only peculiar that so many were deciding to move to these cities by way of purchasing a ticket on POW. These increased profits would allow POW to purchase new IL 62s and offer longer distance destinations as far as Beijing.