Where Britain and France conjured Concorde, Russia forged the Tupolev Tu-144 – a jet so loud passengers could barely hear each other.
Had you been peering up at the heavens just over 25 years ago, somewhere out in the fields on the vague periphery of the Moscow conurbation, you may have seen a ghost.
And yet at one point, it had been the great hope of aeronautical engineering beyond the Iron Curtain; a grand feat that was going to be faster and more remarkable than anything the enemy could accomplish. The surviving aircraft are now museum exhibits. This one is at the Kazan Aviation Institute in Russia.In this particular sprint, the Soviet Union was the winner – initially, at least. Similar in shape – all long pointed nose-cone and graceful broad wingspan – the Tupolev beat Concorde into the air by more than two months, taking off for its first test flight on December 31, 1968 .
The fact that Concorde was now properly airborne – its first commercial departures had taken off from London and Paris on January 21, 1976 – was an inconvenient truth not worth mentioning. Unable to silence it, the crew had to resort to stuffing pillows into the speakers. Amid the din, rumours spread that the Tu-144’s front and left landing gear could not be extended, that a crash was all but unavoidable – to the point that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was kept informed of the plane’s fragile progress. As it transpired, it landed safely, but the raw stench of embarrassment lingered.Only 16 Tu-144s were made. They only ever operated on that one route, to Kazakhstan.
A second was that, in following a Concorde which had flown earlier, the Soviet pilots were indulging in a game of one-upmanship, and had attempted manoeuvres of which their Tu-144 was incapable. At the root of the dysfunction was a lack of research. Concorde underwent 5000 hours of tests before being certified for passenger service; the Tu-144 was subjected to half as much scrutiny before receiving its rubber stamp.
A Tu-144 at Technik Museum Sinsheim in Germany, the only version of the aircraft you can find outside Russia.And its eye alighted, once more, on the Tupolevs mouldering in hangars. Between 1985 and 1988, two Tu-144s were press-ganged into high altitude – redeployed as training craft and “flying laboratories” for cosmonauts hoping to go into orbit on the Buran. They never would.
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