I was reading up on the Soviet Concorde a couple days ago and it got me to thinking. While I know very few people ever took that, the Soviet design bureaus did manufacture a lot of passenger jets (some still in use to this day in N Korea and Iran). So my question is: how attainable was (primarily domestic) jet travel in the USSR? I know international travel was difficult for the average citizen, but were plane tickets something the average worker would have had access to? How much did they cost compared to a train ticket the same distance? And were there any changes over the course of the decades to attainability and/or the widening of availability?
The Soviet Union decided quite early in its existence (1920s) that it would be a good idea for them to develop their air transport infrastructure. They looked at their more remote territories - particularly Siberia - and concluded air transport might be the better and more economical solution than building a huge road or rail network to all these areas.
In the 1930s, under the state owned company Aeroflot, soviet air transportation started “taking off” (sorry). But at this point it was largely freight based, not passenger based. While there were passenger planes they weren’t used often by the average citizen, with the average ticket costing ~350 roubles, around half a month’s average worker’s salary. However it’s worth mentioning that in 1939 the USSR volume of cargo transported by air exceeded that in the US.
As time went by the number of passenger flights continuously grew. The soviet pioneering of jet technology helped develop their planes as well as their rockets in the 50s and 60s, with planes able to make longer and faster direct trips. By 1968, Aeroflot oversaw flights from around 3,500 soviet cities, the vast majority of them having a direct flight to Moscow.
By 1980s aeroflot carried around 116 million passengers a year, in a country with a population of 286 million. As you correctly guessed, this was almost entirely domestic flights, with only ~3.5 million of these passengers on international flights. This is compared to the us, which saw airlines carry around 370 million passengers in 1980 and around 450 million passengers by 1989.
So the general answer to your question is it was fairly common to travel by air in the Soviet Union during the 1960s - 1980s, although not as common as it was in the US.
It’s also maybe worth noting that by the 1980s Aeroflot was commonly criticised by both international visitors from the west and by soviet citizens themselves. The infrastructure servicing the air travel (e.g. terminals) was often considered poorly designed, with long waiting times. The planes themselves, as well as the crew members, were also often criticised as being generally below western standards. Areoflot also had the worst safety record of any airline, which is quite often attributed to the lower engineering quality of the soviet airlines.