CONCORDE – The greatest feat in aviation?

[Hussain]

Farnborough 1976

 

[Hussain]

The Soviet Union’s flawed rival to Concorde​

14 August 2020

Stephen Dowling
Features correspondent
View attachment 112326
Science Photo Library
Tu-144 in flight (Credit: Science Photo Library)

The world’s first supersonic airliner was not the Anglo-French Concorde but a Soviet design intended to show the world the superiority of the USSR.

It is December 1968, and a truly ground-breaking airliner is about to take its first flight.

It resembles a giant white dart, as futuristic an object as anything humanity has made in the 1960s. The aircraft is super streamlined to be able to fly at the speed of a rifle bullet – once thought too fast for a passenger-carrying aircraft.

The distinctive, needle-nosed front of the aircraft looks like the business end of something rocket-powered from a Flash Gordon serial; when the aircraft approaches the runway, the whole nose is designed to slide down, giving the pilots a better view of the ground. The effect makes the aircraft look like a giant bird about to land.

It sounds like a description of the Anglo-French Concorde, the plane that will cross the Atlantic in little more than three hours – but it’s not. The spaceship-styled jet sports the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union on its giant tailfin. It is the Tupolev Tu-144, the communist Concorde, and the first passenger aircraft to fly more than twice the speed of sound.

Its first flight comes three months before Concorde takes to the air. But the Tu-144 – dubbed ‘Concordski’ by Western observers for its similarities to its luxurious rival – never quite becomes a household name.

It is partly down to design failure – but also because of a high-profile disaster at the 1973 Paris Air Show, a tragedy that took place in front of the world’s press.
***

Like many of the great technological feats during the Cold War, politics is at the heart of the Tu-144’s story.

In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushschev was made aware of a new aircraft project being investigated by Britain and France to help revitalise their aircraft industries. That passenger aircraft – Concorde – was designed to fly at supersonic speeds, cutting the time it would take to fly from Europe to the US to just a few hours.

Two years later, the British and French signed an official deal to begin design and manufacture. Around the same time, supersonic transport (SST) projects from planemakers Boeing and Lockheed were also given the go ahead.
View attachment 112328
Science Photo Library
Soviet designers had already used the delta wing configuration on fighters like the MiG-21 (Credit: Science Photo Library)

The Soviets realised they had no time to lose.
“The rivalry between Concorde and the Tu-144 was symptomatic of that international era,” says Jock Lowe, a former Concorde pilot and British Airway flight operations manager. “There was the space race and the race to put a man on the Moon race happening at the same time.

It was an international race between the Tu-144 and Concorde and the American designs made by Boeing and Lockheed – Jock Lowe, former Concorde pilot
“The thesis was, up to that point, that the faster the aircraft, the more successful it was,” Lowe says. With fighter planes like the MiG-21 and the American F-104 already capable of flying at twice the speed of sound, supersonic travel seemed a possible – if challenging – task.

“Early Soviet success in the space race reinforced confidence in a technocratic political era, and this drove the leadership to believe it could compete with prestigious Western projects,” says David Kaminski-Morrow of aviation publisher Flight Global.

The Soviets had already achieved a coup with Tupolev’s Tu-104 jet airliner, which came as a complete surprise to the West when it took Soviet delgations on visits in the 1950s. According to author Howard Moon’s book Soviet SST, a definitive history of the Tu-144 written before the end of the Cold War, the Tu-104 paved the way for grander aviation ambitions.
View attachment 112329
Getty Images
The first Soviet airliner, the Tupolev Tu-104, was a surprise to the West (Credit: Getty Images)

In the 1950s, the USSR’s rapid industrialisation led Soviet planners to demand ever-more impressive projects. “Adding to the laurels of the Soviet space programme and Soviet military aviation, it appealed enormously to leaders mesmerised by the very real achievements of their leading-edge industries. This tension between Soviet technical and economic reality and the heightened expectations of the Soviet elite that commissioned it explains much of its subsequent complex history,” wrote Moon.

The Tu-144 project became something that had to succeed, regardless of the effort required to bring it. And in the 1960s – with so much of the Soviet technical resources thrown into the space race – that was not inconsiderable, according to Kaminski-Morrow.

“The space race undermined the Tu-144 programme by shifting the Soviet focus towards long-range rocketry and high-altitude missiles, and away from supersonic bombers, effectively forcing the Soviets to develop the Tu-144 as a standalone civil aircraft programme.

“This ran counter to Soviet experience in creating airliners and left the developers with the hugely ambitious task of designing from scratch a complex supersonic aircraft which could also satisfy requirements for comfort and economic performance – requirements which had seldom been necessary to consider.”
View attachment 112330
Alamy
The Tu-144 programme required enormous R&D resources at the same time as the space race (Credit: Alamy)

Several problems soon came to plague the Tu-144. It was a project perhaps 10 to 15 years ahead of what the Soviet aviation industry was capable of at the time. Two of the main areas where the Tu-144 lagged behind were brakes and engine control.

Concorde pioneered some truly bleeding-edge technologies, not least with its brakes. It was one of the first aircraft to have brakes made of carbon fibres, which could withstand the enormous heat generated trying to slow the aircraft after landing (Concorde had a high landing speed around 185mph (296km/h). But the Russians were not able to mimic this design.

An even bigger problem was the engine. Concorde was the first passenger aircraft to have a flight-vital part of its system completely controlled by a computer – it would constantly change the shape of the air inlets to ensure the engines were operating as efficiently as possible.

View attachment 112331
Science Photo Library
Concorde featured many advanced technologies that the Soviets could not match (Credit: Science Photo Library)

And Concorde also had a flight control system that could adjust, ever so slightly, the shape of the wing to reduce drag as it flew at supersonic speeds. Such computer-controlled wings were unheard of before Concorde – now, today’s sub-sonic airliners also sport them.

Aware that Concorde was slowly but methodically taking shape, the Soviet Union poured more and more resources into the Tu-144. It is something of a testament to the Tupolev design bureau – and the teams from engine designers Kuznetsov and Kolesov, who both built powerplants for the ambitious new airliner – that amid the enormous effort to match the American space programmes, they still managed to build such a plane.
Compared to Concorde, the Tu-144 was much bigger. It was over 215ft (67m) in length – around 12ft (3.7m) longer than its Anglo-French rival. It was designed to cruise at just over Mach 2 (1,340 mph/2,158 km/h) and each of its four engines, with the afterburner lit, could generate more than 44,000lbs of thrust each – 6,000lbs more thrust from each engine than Concorde could achieve.

The Tu-144 was less aerodynamic – just slightly, but these things are critical – Jock Lowe
But while the Tu-144 was more powerful, it also took more effort to get into the air. Empty, the Tu-144 weighed a few hundred kilograms under 100 tonnes – more than 20 tonnes heavier than an empty Concorde. Part of this was due to the enormous undercarriage. Concorde had two wheels at the front, and two sets of four wheels underneath the wings. The Tu-144 had two at the front but 12 underneath the wings, partly because Russian tyres were made of synthetic rubber and were more prone to failure (the thinking being that if one or two failed, there would be enough to support the aircraft’s weight).

While on the surface the Tu-144 looked very similar to Concorde, there were many differences, many of them less sophisticated solutions to the problems Concorde’s designers had also solved.

“The Tu-144 was less aerodynamic – just slightly, but these things are critical,” says Lowe.
View attachment 112333
The Tu-144 looked very similar to Concorde, especially in its supersonic flight profile (Credit: Alamy)

“We looked at it and we knew by the time it came into service it wasn’t going to be a competitor.”

The USSR, however, won bragging rights over who got to fly a supersonic airliner first. The Tu-144 first took off in December 1968, and flew supersonic for the first time in June 1969. Concorde would not take to the air until March 1969, and did not go supersonic until October of that year. The Soviets had won a major diplomatic coup – but they soon encountered a series of headaches trying to get the nearly 100-tonne airliner into service.

Western observers, used to the perceived superiority of technology west of the Berlin Wall, believed that the only way the Soviet Union could have come up with the Tu-144 was through industrial espionage; the Tu-144 was dubbed ‘Concordski’, and regarded as an almost carbon copy of Concorde, though with a cruder Soviet finish.

The truth, says Kamisnki-Morrow, wasn’t quite so clear cut. “There is no doubt that Soviet thinking on the Tu-144 was heavily influenced by Concorde – the absence of a horizontal stabiliser [tail planes], for example, was a radical departure from previous Soviet designs.

“But other aspects, such as the engine configuration, were notably different. The Tu-144 also needed to be more rugged to cope with tougher operating conditions.

Although espionage played a role in the Tu-144's development, the Soviets were still capable of exploring their own avenues to solve the multitude of technical problems thrown up by the project. The result was an aircraft which broadly resembled Concorde but which differed substantially in refinement and detail.”

The rivalry among the two supersonic airliner teams was immense

In 1973, the Soviet unveiled the Tu-144 to the West at the Paris Air Show. Tupolev flew the second of their production models to the airshow, pitting it head-to-head against a prototype Concorde already carrying out public flying displays (at this stage, the Western design was still waiting to go into production).

The rivalry among the two supersonic airliner teams was immense. "Just wait until you see us fly," Tu-144 test pilot Mikhail Koslov apparently taunted the Concorde team, according to Time magazine. "Then you'll see something." On 3 June the Tu-144 took to the air, with Kozlov seemingly intent on surpassing Concorde’s flying display the day before, which had been somewhat cautious. Then disaster struck.

The Tu-144 took off, then approached the runway as if to make a landing, with its nose drooped and its undercarriage down – then climbed rapidly, with its engines at full power. Seconds later, it pitched over, broke up in the air and dived into a nearby village. All six of the crew and eight people in the village were killed.

There were several theories as to why the Tu-144 crashed; some believed the pilot had manoeuvred too hard at slow speed, causing the plane to lose lift. Others said the cloudy conditions might have confused the crew. Another theory was the plane had, at the last minute, had to swerve to avoid a French Mirage fighter jet that was flying close to take pictures of the Tupolev’s front canards, which were advanced for the time.

View attachment 112334
Alamy
The Tu-144 was intended to make a big impression at the 1973 Paris Air Show – but disaster struck (Credit: Alamy)

The crash only highlighted some ongoing issues with Tupolev’s pioneering design, and the Soviet state airline Aeroflot started to get nervous about bringing it into full service. Tupolev had to fix a myriad of issues before the aircraft could be signed off for service. Even then, the first airline flights in 1975 were still essentially test runs, carrying mail instead of passengers from Moscow to what is now Almaty in Kazakhstan.

It took until 1977 for the Tu-144 to start taking passengers.
The Soviets couldn’t find an elegant solution to reducing noise inside the passenger cabin. The engines, and the air conditioning units which drew air from the engine inlets, both created enormous noise. Air conditioning was vital – the cabin would otherwise have become dangerously hot from the heat generated by air friction on the plane’s skin.
Concorde used its fuel as a ‘heat sink’ to keep temperatures down, so didn’t need such powerful air conditioners – and this kept noise down to acceptable levels.

The difference between the Tu-144 and Concorde is apparent in Moon’s description of the first Tu-144 flight that carried foreign observers:

Passengers complained that the loud onrushing sound of wind made conversation impossible and communicated with each other by passing notes – Howard Moon
“The cabin had shortcomings: several ceiling panels were ajar, service trays stuck, and window shades dropped without being pulled. The five-abreast seating was criticised as cramped. Not all the toilets worked. These shortcomings were normal in a new airliner. A more serious problem remained. On-board speakers played the theme from Love Story, Gloomy Sunday, and Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, but few aboard could hear it. Their dominant impression was not speed but noise.

“Fed by the onrushing air, the huge air-conditioners and the huge engines created ‘an ear-shattering roar that could almost have been heard in Queens’, according to the New York Times….Passengers complained that the loud onrushing sound of wind made conversation impossible and communicated with each other by passing notes.”

Tupolev had brought the Tu-144 into the air, but once in service, it seemed that the plane was more trouble than it was worth. The intensely political project had chewed through enormous resources. In 1977, Tupolev tried to buy some of the engine management computers Concorde used, but the British, fearing they could also be used on Soviet jet bombers, refused.

View attachment 112335
Getty Images
The Tu-144 was one of the last airliners to have to use a braking parachute to decelerate (Credit: Getty Images)

What had been one of the Soviet Union’s prized technological feats became a political hot potato. Aeroflot did not even make any reference to the aircraft in its five-year plan from 1976 to 1982. After a modified Tu-144 crashed on a pre-delivery test flight in June 1978, Aeroflot pulled the plug on the Tu-144’s airline career. It had flown only 102 commercial flights, and only 55 of those had carried passengers. Concorde, in comparison, flew for more than 25 years, racking up thousands of flights and becoming one of the most iconic designs of the 20th Century.

The Tu-144’s production officially ended in 1982. The 14 remaining Tu-144s had a brief second life, training crews for the planned Soviet space shuttle, the Buran. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the remaining models were mostly mothballed, a few of them in storage at the Soviet aircraft testing base at Zhukovsky, near Moscow.

***
That should have been the end of the Tu-144’s story. But it wasn’t.

In the 1990s, Nasa began a multi-billion-dollar project to build the next generation of supersonic transports, called the High Speed Research (HSR) programme . Boeing and Lockheed had started building Concorde-like designs in the 1960s but they had been cancelled for various reasons, including fuel costs and noise concerns. Now, nearly 30 years later, Nasa hoped to pick up from where those projects left off.

One member of the programme was a Nasa test pilot called Rob Rivers. He was to become the only member of a very exclusive club – a pilot who would fly both Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144.

I thought it would be a great idea to fly the Concorde – Robert Rivers, Nasa test pilot
“I was more or less the programme pilot for the HSR, working with Boeing and other partners. And that was a big project – about a $4bn project from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.

“While I was on the HSR a British Airways pilot came over to Langley to talk to us about Concorde and high-speed flying.

“I thought it would be a great idea to fly the Concorde, and was able to convince othe HSR programme officer the value of it as well. So in 1997, I flew up to JFK Airport and sat in the jumpseat of a Concorde and flew out. I was sat there with my stopwatches and a notebook and a tape measure and recorded all that I could of an Atlantic crossing in a supersonic airliner.” Rivers later flew a series of flights in the Concorde simulator near Bristol, and flew back to America in the cockpit of another Concorde.
Because the US had never built a supersonic airliner – its own plans in the 20th Century had fallen through – Nasa needed help from elsewhere to carry out flight tests.
There was one big problem. “Neither British Airways nor Air France had a spare Concorde we could use for experiments,” says Rivers.

The Soviet Union had collapsed only a few years before. Russia was in dire shape, with its economy in freefall. “President Bill Clinton and the Russians had talked about a huge project with the Russian aviation industry, so that their engineers didn’t float away to places like Iran,” says Rivers.

And what Russia did have was a supersonic airliner – albeit one that had had a chequered career, and was no longer flying.

View attachment 112336
Science Photo Library
The Tu-144 gave Nasa the chance to use a real aircraft to help design a supersonic plane of the future (Credit: Science Photo Library)

“An agreement was made in 1993 to lease a Tu-144 a do a number of very sophisticated experiments,” says Rivers.
It was not easy to do business in Russia. The Tupolev had to be leased by a British company, IBP Aerospace, a contractual company that could act as a go-between.
“So here was the deal – Nasa had to pay Boeing to pay IBP to pay Tupolev. There were payments in the middle of the night to pay for fuel with US dollars – which were illegal in Russia at the time but the only currency that many vendors would accept,” says Rivers.

It would be an embarrassment if a Nasa pilot turned up on crutches – Rob Rivers

“The Tupolev we flew had only flown 83 hours and had been retired in 1990. It was mothballed in 1993, but just like a phoenix it rose again.”

The Tu-144 leased by Nasa was fitted with more reliable, modern engines and a whole suite of instruments, including a special ‘data bus’, one which could store all the data from the many experiments running as the plane flew its missions.

However, the early flights were a disaster in terms of data collection. The data bus recorded impossible flight characteristics. The Russian pilots, flying the plane on behalf of Tupolev, couldn’t be interviewed by Nasa.

“Interviews with the pilots hadn’t been written into the contract. And Tupolev was in such financial strife that they only paid you for what was in the contract. If you flew a flight, they paid you after the flight.”

It was decided that Nasa would have to send its own pilots to test the Tupolev.

View attachment 112337
Nasa
The Nasa programme brought the Tu-144 back from the dead in the late 1990s (Credit: Nasa)

Rivers was confirmed, and his Russian visit was earmarked for September 1998. A few weeks beforehand, he took a short break with a few friends.

“I go trout fishing in Wyoming. And I have a really bad fall while I’m hiking in the back country – I break my tibia, I suffer a spiral fracture of the tibia and fibula and a broken ankle,” says Rivers.

“In Wyoming I tell the doctor ‘I’ve got to get to Russia in two weeks. You’ve got to fix me.’ He said ‘No way, you’re going to be in a cast for six to eight months.’” Eventually the doctor relented, and put a metal rod in Rivers’ leg so he could make the trip.

Nasa did not want Rivers to go to Russia while he was injured. “They felt it would be an embarrassment if a Nasa pilot turned up on crutches,” Rivers says. But it was too late to find someone else.

Rivers’ grimaced through his long-haul flight to Moscow, and was then whisked in a van straight from the airport by Alexander Pukhov, Tupolev’s design director who had worked on the Tu-144 programme in the 1960s. On his first night, he ended up being taken to Tupolev’s flight surgeon. There, Pukhov – a man with a formidable reputation – struck a deal with Rivers.

“Pukhov says to me ‘As long as you’re not on crutches in front of the press, and as long as you’re not on crutches when you walk to the airplane, you can fly.’

When I saw the aircraft for the first time - how big it was and how tall it was off the ground…it was just amazing – Rob Rivers

“My leg was killing me but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. This was going to be the highlight of my test pilot career. I was going to be one of only two Western people to fly it.”

Rivers and fellow pilot Gordon Fullerton – along with Nasa engineers Bruce Jackson and Tim Cox – were billeted at a former KGB sanatorium near Zhukovsky, a former Soviet airbase used for testing experimental designs and prototypes.

“When I saw the aircraft for the first time – how big it was and how tall it was off the ground – it was just amazing.”
Rivers kept to his word that he wouldn’t walk to the plane for his first flight on his crutches, but walking on his ankle was agony. “I spent a lot of hours practising walking with a cane. I could not have done it without my friend Bruce Jackson. It was excruciating to put pressure on my ankle.

View attachment 112338
Alamy
The Tu-144 lacked the sophistication of Concorde, but it was a much more powerful aircraft (Credit: Alamy)

“At the pre-flight party the day before my first flight I threw my crutches down. I walked out towards Professor Pukhov on my cane, and Pukhov gives this huge belly laugh, and there’s cheers from everyone, and it was just like something from a movie.”

Rivers and Fullerton (who died in 2013) flew the Tu-144 on a series on flights through to the end of 1998. And by the end of it Rivers was the only person on Earth who could lay claim to first-hand experience flying both the Tu-144 and its Western competitor. He says he could not have done it without the assistance of the Russian flight crew, pilot Serge Boresov, navigator Viktor Pedos and flight enginner Anatoli Kriulin, whose expert knoweldge helped make the flights a success.

The Nasa flights spelled the end of the Tu-144’s flying career. Despite the refinements added with Western help, the aircraft was too expensive and unreliable to fly passengers once more. The remaining 'Concordskis' are now in museums or stored in hangars. One now stands outside a technical museum in Germany, right next to an example of its old rival, Concorde.

“The Concorde was more sophisticated,” Rivers says. “But there are many examples of sophisticated engineering on the Tu-144 as well,” he says.

“They were different. The Tu-144, it could carry more passengers, and it could fly them faster, and higher. Tupolev created a remarkable plane that could do what only one other plane in history could do.

“A Concorde was like a Kentucky thoroughbred – a delicate horse but very speedy. And the Tu-144 is like a Clydesdale, a massive horse with unbelievable power but not nearly as efficient.”

Professor unmasks Russian spy who stole the secrets of Concorde​

Agent Ace leaked engine designs in Cold War battle for technical supremacy

Alex Farber
Media Correspondent
Friday November 24 2023,
The Times
View attachment 112340
Concorde was the subject of a Cold War challenge by Russia to prove that it was technically superior to the West
GETTY IMAGES

Concorde is famous as being the pinnacle of British-French aviation but the story of how it fell victim to a Russian plot to steal its secrets is less well known.

Twenty years after the supersonic jet that transformed transatlantic flight touched down for the final time, a Channel 4 documentary has unmasked the spy, codenamed Agent Ace, whose efforts meant that it was almost eclipsed by a Soviet rival.

Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a two-part film released on Saturday, details how Ace handed 90,000 pages of classified records to the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Among the documents were the top-secret designs for the aircraft’s Rolls Royce Olympus 593 engines as its Cold War rival sought to win the race to develop its own supersonic jet, dubbed Concordski by western media.

At stake was the opportunity to prove which power was the most technically advanced and land a string of lucrative commercial contracts with airlines.

Ace has been unmasked by Dr Calder Walton, assistant director of the Belfer Centre’s intelligence project at Harvard, after studying the tightly-restricted archives of the KGB defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin, held by Churchill College, Cambridge.

In the film, Walton names Ivor James Gregory as the mole.

View attachment 112341
Agent Ace gave Russia access to top secret designs for the Concorde’s Rolls Royce engines
VICTOR DREES/DAILY EXPRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Gregory, who died in 1982 aged 73, was born in Hong Kong and trained as an engineer before his career progressed within British European Airways.

“We don’t know Agent Ace’s motivations. There’s nothing in his background to suggest he was an ideologically committed Communist although he may have been very good at hiding it,” said Walton.

“However the KGB were masters of bribery and blackmail, so that could have been a factor. Or maybe he was just looking for money.”

Gregory is the second British spy connected to Concorde after the electronic engineer Jimmy Doyle admitted in 1971 that he shared secrets with the Kremlin for cash after being contacted by the Soviet embassy.

View attachment 112339
The intelligence historian Calder Walton said the spy he unmasked could have been motivated by ideology, money or blackmail
PBS


View attachment 112342
The KGB defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin
PENGUIN

The information they shared with the Soviet Union helped it to launch the Tupolev 144. With Concorde still at the prototype stage, it was unveiled at the Paris Air Show in 1973 but crashed, possibly while performing a manouvre beyond its capabilities. The six crew and eight people on the ground died and the Russian jet was never really able to challenge its western twin.

Walton, whose third book Spies, the Epic Intelligence War between East and West will be published next year, added that the extent to which British intelligence were aware of the situation remains unknown.

He suggested the possibility that the documents Gregory was passing to the Soviets may have been sabotaged before being passed on.

“It’s not impossible that the British corrupted some of the information. That is definitely something that the US did in other areas,” he said.

View attachment 112343
Crowds gather watch a Concorde pass over the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol on its final flight in 2003
SOUTH WEST NEWS SERVICE

It finally entered service two years after Concorde but design flaws meant it only operated on limited flights between Moscow and Kazakhstan, with passengers reporting numerous horror stories. It was cancelled after just six months and 55 passenger flights.

View attachment 112344
The Tupolev 144 under deveolpment near Moscow at the end of the 1960s. It only made 55 passenger flights, mostly between Russia and Kazakhstan
AFP

“The Soviets were good at reverse engineering things and had some of the best mathematicians on the planet but they were very bad at transforming things into practical products,” Walton said.

“Concorde was a wonderful status symbol for the UK and the western world and being able to create a rival went to the core of the Kremlin’s desire to be taken seriously as a world power that is capable of the same things as the western world. That has not gone away, it’s still here today.”

The beginning of the end for Concorde came on July 25, 2000, when a fire in the undercarriage caused one of the French aircraft to crash over the village of Gonesse, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew members.

A major safety overhaul was completed after just over a year but the very first test flight took place on September 11, 2001 and despite its flawless trip across the Atlantic it landed back into a changed world of aviation in which it no longer fitted.

It made its final flight two years later.

Tupolev Tu-144's Aeroflot career​

By Andreas Spaeth
20th October 2026


Certain events in the Tupolev Tu-144’s career — beating Concorde into the air as the world’s first supersonic commercial transport, the very public Paris show disaster — have tended to obscure its actual service life with Aeroflot. But that was an almost unmitigated failure

The Tu-144S originally registered SSSR-77104 became SSSR-77144, in deference to the aircraft’s designation, for its 1975 Paris show outing.
ALAMY

To comprehend what an unimaginable effort, but at the same time an absurdity, the development of the first supersonic transport represented, one has to take oneself back to the Soviet Union of the 1960s. Fuelled by the Cold War and the competition between east and west, the Soviets managed to put an SST into the air on 31 December 1968, more than two months prior to the Anglo-French Concorde achieving its maiden flight on 2 March 1969. Exactly that, being first, was the primary goal. As would emerge over the decade that followed, it remained the sole real success of the Tupolev Tu-144. With hindsight it appears almost delusional that the USSR, the way it was then, chose to produce a supersonic airliner.

From the outset, politics and propaganda played a decisive role in the Tu-144, in an effort to be victorious in the perceived race to get a supersonic airliner off the ground. Everything else was of lesser priority, which didn’t benefit the aircraft’s design. Ilya Grinberg, a professor at New York State University in Buffalo, said, “Political priorities to overcome the West, no matter how, obviously played a negative role, as they favoured rushing over proper scheduling in a highly challenging and complicated field.”

“Perhaps its fate was sealed from the start”

The Soviet SST was supposed to cut the flight time from Moscow to Khabarovsk in the Far East, close to Japan, from eight to three-and-a-half hours and bring Siberia closer to the distant capital. At the time, 85 per cent of travellers on those routes chose to go by air, most of them state bureaucrats, planners and civil servants. The five hours saved, multiplied with the number of professional travellers, resulted in an impressive efficiency gain on paper, which was used internally for the advancement of the SST programme. It “obviously was not originally intended for the toiling masses”, wrote Howard Moon in his 1989 book Soviet SST, “nor were its infrequent scheduled flights truly open to the public. It was conceived as a conveyance for the Soviet elite.”

Perhaps its ultimate fate was sealed from the start. On 26 July 1963, work officially began on the biggest and most complex aircraft programme the USSR had ever tackled. Within five years, according to plans, five prototypes were to be built, the first appearing in 1966. Specifications called for a cruise speed of Mach 2.2, a range of 4,000-4,500km (2,486-2,796 miles) with 80-100 passengers or 6,000-6,500km (3,728-4,039 miles) with 30-50 on board, and a maximum take-off weight of 120-130 tons. The whole project hinged on the question of whether engines could be made available to deliver the necessary thrust, as only afterburning turbofans would be up to the task. Manufacturer Kuznetzov was tasked with developing the Tu-144’s propulsion, its engineers coming up with the twin-shaft NK-144 developing 20 tons (44,092lb) of thrust.

The four NK-144s each boasted their own rectangular air inlet with horizontal ramps and an automated control mechanism. This system was supposed to supply the turbine with the optimum amount of air in each phase of flight, a prerequisite for supersonic cruise. But the construction process proved problematic, as the nacelles and inlets were designed independently of the engines themselves. This led to a lack of co-ordination between these two fundamental systems and remained a weakness of the Tu-144.

❖

What’s more, both outer engines were meant to have thrust-reversers, but never did. Thus the Tu-144 became the last new passenger airliner to be routinely equipped with braking parachutes. This was essential owing to the type’s poor slow-flying capabilities, leading to high landing speeds of up to 369km/h (229mph). Concorde landed at 287-296km/h (178-184mph).

By the end of 1968, the prototype — bearing the registration SSSR-68001, denoting the year and the first Tu-144 — was ready. Engine trials, taxi-testing and final ground checks took a full month, and December’s prolonged bad weather prevented a flight. On the morning of 31 December, time was pressing if it was to take place before the conclusion of the year. But everything proceeded as planned: the world’s first supersonic airliner lifted off the runway at Ramenskoye, otherwise known as Zhukovsky. During the 37-minute low-altitude test flight in subsonic cruise, the undercarriage remained extended and the Tu-144 was shadowed by a MiG-21I chase aircraft. The pilots reported over the radio that it was easy to fly and handle. They had kept their word and adhered to the timeline given to beat Concorde.

What followed has been dissected many times: years of tests exposing major flaws, radical redesigns, the appearance of what was basically a new aircraft by the same name and the crash of SSSR-77102, the first series production-standard Tu-144S, after an overstressing incident and in-flight break-up at the 1973 Paris show. That disaster, which killed eight inhabitants of Goussainville as well as the Soviet crew of six, was a blow from which the aircraft never really recovered. “While the Soviets suffered an enormous loss in prestige, they could always retreat to using their SST only on internal routes”, wrote Moon.

❖

Despite the setback, flight-testing progressed and five additional Tu-144S models had joined the fleet by the end of 1975. But the SST still wasn’t anything like in shape for commercial passenger flights. Early in 1973, there was an assumption of 30 orders by — or, more properly for the USSR, allocations to — Aeroflot, and an increase to 75 was expected. That year Aeroflot announced its Tu-144 route network, connections to the west Siberian oil and gas fields being a priority. The first was heralded as Moscow to Khabarovsk, most likely with fuel stops in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk due to a lack of range. After that, it envisaged a foray into the Pacific. Plans called for these routes to be launched in 1975, followed by Europe in 1978-79 and expansion to the US, Singapore and Tokyo during the 1980s. But from 1975 onwards chief designer Aleksey Tupolev was focused solely on domestic routes, of which 14 were felt suitable, varying between 3,000 and 6,000km (1,864 and 3,728 miles) in length.

Cause for celebration at Alma-Ata — today the Kazakh capital Almaty — on 1 November 1977, following Aeroflot’s inaugural Tu144S service with SSSR-77109 from Moscow.
ALAMY

Even though the Tu-144 still had no type certificate, there was a desire to begin passenger operations seven years after the aircraft’s maiden flight. Therefore, on 26 December 1975 a ‘scheduled service’ was launched between Moscow and Alma-Ata, which was also earmarked for passenger operations. Only cargo and air mail were carried on the route of just 3,260km (2,026 miles), not a distance suitable for going supersonic. It was especially odd to expedite post and freight in a country where time was less than critical, as onward delivery on the ground was so slow.

On the cargo and mail runs, speeds of up to 2,200km/h (1,367mph) were reached at an altitude of 18,000m (59,055ft). Initially there were two flights a week, but trouble wasn’t long in coming. Fuel feed problems led to the inaugural passenger flight being postponed far into the future, while the cargo operations were cut to just one per week in June 1976. “The Tu-144 failed even in the light-duty supersonic air-freight service”, stated Moon. The wait for a type certificate was likewise prolonged, but finally it was awarded by the relevant authority, USSR Gosaviaregister, on 29 October 1977. Almost nine years on from the first flight, 11 aircraft including prototypes and a pre-production model had been built. At least four of them were deemed suitable for scheduled passenger use.

The Soviet leadership decided for political reasons to put the Tu-144 into scheduled service, although it knew test results stated it was structurally unsafe and not suitable for regular operations. It further attested to the limited significance Aeroflot afforded its perceived flagship that it hadn’t even been mentioned in the carrier’s five-year plan for 1976-80. Only reluctantly did Aeroflot follow its political orders.

“Aeroflot knew it was structurally unsafe”

The big day was chosen as 1 November 1977, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the October revolution. An 08.30hrs departure was scheduled for the Tu-144’s inaugural scheduled service from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport to Alma-Ata, flight number SU499. The Tu-144 was not an easy fit for practical operations. According to Moon, it “required special passenger ramps because of its tall landing gear, and baggage had to be carried through the long, cramped passenger compartment to the tail”. There the small cargo compartment was located, with a volume of just 20 cubic meters (706 cubic feet).

It was remarkable to see commercial pilots wearing special pressure suits and leather helmets, while their Concorde counterparts sat in the cockpit in shirtsleeves, even at Mach 2. “In a loss of cabin pressure pilots wouldn’t have lost consciousness with these vests”, Tupolev engineers later pointed out.

“With its four jet-engine afterburners shooting orange tongues of flames like rockets, the 197-foot-long plane lifted sharply off the runway here at 9:02 A.M., after a half-hour delay caused by a new motorized embarkation ramp that would not work”, the New York Times reported the next day. There were 80 passengers on board, despite previously published cabin seat maps showing 138 seats in the regular Aeroflot configuration. Only two of them had paid the regular fare of 83 rubles — about US$400 at today’s values — including a supersonic surcharge of 21 rubles. This fare equalled about half of an average Soviet monthly income. “Propaganda imperatives took precedence over realistic consideration of its potential economical contribution or potential costs,” asserted Howard Moon. “Its role as an airliner serving the Soviet economy was eclipsed by the drive to play up a showcase of Soviet technology on a global scale.”


A few international journalists, hand-picked by the Soviet foreign ministry, made use of the first — and, as it turned out, last — opportunity for westerners to try out the Tu-144. They reported the aircraft seemed unready for scheduled flying and apparently had been pushed into service with undue haste, something even apparent through small items that presumably could have been remedied fairly easily. Moon described how panels in the cabin ceiling were half-open, some of the fold-down tables were jammed, window blinds closed randomly by themselves, and not all the reading lights and toilets functioned.

❖

After two hours the inaugural flight landed in Alma-Ata. Then a long wait began while the aircraft was pushed around to position it precisely next to the gangway. Only then could the big reception begin, with workers waving flags and displaying banners. It was a carefully staged event, the cheering crowd lined up with the impressive mountain scenery of Alma-Ata airport looming behind. The festivities complete, the inaugural guests flew back to Domodedovo on the same aircraft, Tu-144S SSSR-77109, landing safely six-and-a-half hours after departure.

Capt Boris Kuznetzov was, unsurprisingly, positive: “Everything worked perfectly”. The passengers, however, had rather mixed reviews. “The feeling of acceleration at take-off is extraordinary”, said Reuters correspondent Charles Bremner. “It felt as though we were being kicked in the back, and the ground just fell away beneath us as we took off”. Daniel Vernet of Le Monde described the flight as “perfectly smooth”, but pointed out a shortcoming the Tu-144 never overcame: “During the flight the cabin is noisy. One can have a conversation only with difficulty”. Howard Moon called it, “a cacophony only suitable for combat crews with helicopter soundproofing helmets.”

Aleksey Tupolev, who was on board, promised, “We are working on the noise problem”. But a lack of funding meant he never came up with solutions. The noise of the engines, the heating system — which worked with used cabin air — and the air conditioning remained infernal. Passengers seated together could only communicate by shouting. If they were even one seat apart, writing notes was the sole option. The worst-affected area was the aft section near the engines. The average noise level in the entire Tu-144 cabin was as high as 95dB, compared to about 85dB in today’s airliner cabins. It never crossed Aeroflot’s mind to lend sound-absorbing helmets to passengers, though it was often suggested.

After the premiere, Aeroflot intended to put on a supersonic service every Tuesday. Flight SU499 was due to depart Moscow Domodedovo at 08.20, arriving in Alma-Ata at 10.50, while the return journey was numbered SU500. Both were two hours faster than subsonic flights between the two cities. Although eight production aircraft had been assembled, and two spares were parked nearby during the ceremonies at Domodedovo, the plan remained to just mount one round trip per week. Things got off to a rough start. On the first two Tuesdays the Tu-144 flights were cancelled, and on the third it was postponed. The first of many serious technical problems occurred on 27 December 1977, in the form of a cabin depressurisation. No wonder the supersonic airliners soon earned the nickname “fair-weather jets”, as each flight was a nail-biting affair for those responsible.

“Flying the Tu-144 is like kissing a tiger”

“Among the crews there was a saying: ‘Flying the Tu-144 is like kissing a tiger’”, recalled Vladimir Potemkin, deputy head of operations at the Ministry of Civil Aviation. “There were no fuel reserves in case the destination airport at Alma-Ata was closed, and if then Tashkent as the only alternate was unavailable, you couldn’t land anywhere. For that reason, for every flight the entire ministry was on alert. Every 15 minutes we inquired about the weather at both airports”. A procedure was established whereby not one but two deputy Soviet ministers, for civil aviation and the aerospace industry, had to give the green light for every single scheduled flight. So did Aleksey Tupolev. It all resulted in many short-notice cancellations.

This demonstrates how the Kremlin’s upper echelons felt there was a high risk of a catastrophe during supersonic operations. Such a worst-case scenario seemed inevitable on 25 January 1978, when 22 of 24 essential systems on board a Tu-144 failed. As the passengers included many important media representatives and guests, it was decided to proceed with the flight, even though eight of those systems had failed before take-off. In the air, the situation became so bad that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was informed due to the potential for bad publicity from the looming disaster. Miraculously, all went fine.

While scheduled operations ran at the lowest possible level, the Tu-144 programme soon received another blow. On 23 May 1978, the first production example of the new long-haul Tu-144D version, SSSR-77111, was on a test sortie prior to delivery to Aeroflot. In an effort to improve range performance and fuel consumption, this variant had non-afterburning Kolesov RD-36-51A engines producing 44,000lb of thrust each. Under the command of Eduard Yelyan, strong vibrations caused a leak in a fuel line, leading to eight tons of kerosene accumulating in the nacelle of engine number three. The flight engineers deemed the dwindling fuel reserves indicated by their instruments to be a false alarm and didn’t report them to the pilot. Soon a fire broke out and the pilots shut off engines three and four. On top of that, engine number two failed and the aircraft started trailing fire, the cockpit filling with smoke. The crew succeeded in making a belly-landing in a field close to Yegoryevsk, 100km (62 miles) south-east of Moscow. The drooping portion of the nose was torn off and went underneath the fuselage, puncturing the cockpit where the two flight engineers were sitting. They subsequently died.

The technical cause was related to the Tu144D’s fuel pump system and had no connection with the Tu-144S models flying passenger services. But civil aviation minister Boris Bugayev had had enough, the true number of serious incidents probably being far higher than was known. He ordered the termination of supersonic passenger flights. The 55th and last took place a week later, on 1 June 1978. Just 3,194 passengers had been carried, an average of 58 per flight.

❖

Including the ‘scheduled’ mail and cargo runs between December 1975 and April 1978, there had only been 103 commercial Tu-144 flights. The aircraft had notched up 181 flying hours, 104 of which were at supersonic speeds. During these very limited operations, 226 incidents or failures had occurred on board, 80 of them in flight — at least, this was the number the Soviets reported to the UK when they asked for support, which was rejected due to the risk of shared technology being used for military aircraft as well.

On 7 January 1982, the end of Tu-144 production was announced. Sixteen aircraft had been built: the prototype, a pre-production airframe and 14 serial examples, of which nine were Tu-144Ss and five Tu-144Ds. One more Tu-144D remained unfinished. A government decree on 1 July 1983 terminated the programme, leaving the remaining aircraft to be used as flying laboratories. The final Tu-144 flight, part of a NASA-backed study, took place on 14 April 1999.

Perhaps the best assessment came from Howard Moon. “It is remarkable that this incarnation of 1960s technology and values got this far”, he wrote. “The Central Committee’s launch of Tu-144’s ‘scheduled service’ represented the triumph of hope over experience. Launching this propaganda vehicle for dubious and limited dividends, given Soviet technical inadequacies, reveals the quality of Soviet decision-making in general.”

One of the two aircraft used on the Moscow-Alma Ata passenger services was Tu-144S SSSR-77110, which also attended the 1977 Paris show, thus making the type’s last western appearance.

 

[Hussain]

 

[Hussain]