The first flight to the city was from Bukhara on 3 September 1924 of the Junkers F-13 aircraft piloted by Rashid Beck Ahriev and Peter Komarov; the service began to run three times a week from small airfield on modern day Rudaki Avenue. In 1927, the second air route in the Soviet Union was opened from Tashkent to Samarkand to Termez to Dushanbe on the Junkers F-13, two years before the introduction of automobiles and five before the railway. A small Stalinabad airport was created, and in 1930 a first-class airport was constructed in the city. The first scheduled flight from the city to Moscow began in 1945 on the Li-2. The state airline, Tojikiston, which is now known as Tajik Air, was created in 1949. In the 50s and 60s, many new aircraft were introduced to the Tajik Civil Air Fleet. The Tajik Civil Aviation Administration won first place in the USSR for efficiency in the 1980s.