The Concorde could rip across the Atlantic in just over three hours, twice
as fast as any modern-day airliner. And you'd do it in style while sipping
champagne. Wait a minute... This isn't Concorde!
This is the only other supersonic jet to ever carry commercial passengers.
No, this isn't Concorde. This is the Soviet Union's Tupolev 144.
And yes, it looks like the Concorde but flying on this thing was nothing
like the Concorde. The Tu-144 was kind of like the Concord's crazy older sister.
She was loud, uncomfortable and a little dangerous. But the 144 story is
definitely worth telling. It clearly knocked off a lot of the
Concord's design - just look at - it but it actually did some things better, like
carry more passengers, it even flew faster. But ultimately the 144's story is
about faking it. About deceiving the world. In the 1960's the race to build a
supersonic passenger jet, well it was more than about just flying fast, it was
about asserting superiority for both the Soviets and the West. And the race to be
the first actually started as a three-way between the Americans with
their half-baked Boeing 2707, the joint British-French Concorde, and the Soviets
with their Tu-144. The Americans ruined their shot by tying themselves up in
bureaucracy and cost overruns, this put the Concorde project firmly in the lead.
The Soviets who had more primitive technology had a lot of catching up to
do, so they relied on good old Soviet ingenuity.. oh and they stole a whole
bunch from the Concorde program. Early on Soviet spies made out with over 90,000
technical documents on the Concorde and other aircraft so they caught up to the
Concorde program and the 144 took flight two months before Concorde
It's obvious the Concorde was designed around passenger experience. Journalists
marveled at how quiet and smooth supersonic flight was and how flight
attendants had no trouble chatting up passengers while they served martinis. In
the 144? Well caviar and champagne were also brought out, but Western journalists
fixated on the cramped seats, window shades that would suddenly drop without
being pulled, and that some of the bathrooms weren't even working. The 144's
more primitive engines and cooling system worked together to produce a
sound so loud that passengers couldn't talk to one another. Instead they had to
pass around handwritten notes and playing pass the note with other
passengers must have killed some of the opulence. Not that flying on the 144
was ever going to be a normal experience. The plane only ever saw passenger
service on a single lonely route between Moscow and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The thing
is the 144's engines burned so much fuel, it couldn't actually fly much
further, it couldn't even cross the Soviet Union. Compare that to the
Concorde, its route spanned continents and oceans and the Tu-144 flew only once
a week, even though there were seven more certified and ready for service. This
shows how confident Soviet leaders were in the 144. Out of 102
scheduled flights there were 226 mechanical failures, 80 of which were
serious enough to delay or canceled the flight altogether. The possibility of 144
crashing with passengers on board was a huge political risk. From
the very beginning the one full force air worthiness was in serious question.
It crashed in front of thousands of spectators during the 1973 Paris Air
Show. Then again in 1978 when a cargo version
went down after a fuel line rupture. And yet again in 1981 one suffered an engine
explosion, forcing an emergency landing. The problem was the Tu-144 had clearly
been rushed in its development. Getting this thing built before the Concorde was
more important for the Soviets than actually building it well, and the 144's
engineers had fewer resources and inferior technologies. But still, you
gotta hand it to them for actually getting it done. The Concorde's design
team had state-of-the-art rolls-royce olympus engines with computer-controlled
engine inlets that allowed for something called super
cruise. So once Concorde reached supersonic
her fuel thirsty after burners could be switched off while still maintaining
supersonic. Tu-144 engineers had to make do with engines that needed continuous
afterburners to maintain supersonic. The Concorde had a sophisticated wing
optimized for both supersonic and low-speed flying, the Tu-144's wing was
really only good for supersonic, so pilots had to land the 144
at higher speeds, making for brutally hard landings that even required a
parachute. The Soviets worked around their wing limitations by designing
canards, little deploy-able wings at the front of the aircraft which would
improve low-speed stability. But all the innovation on both sides of the Iron
Curtain couldn't overcome the reality that supersonic travel was just too
expensive. In the capitalist West you could price Concorde tickets at 5 or 6
times what a regular flight would cost, so the Concorde became about glitz and
glamour, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain things were a little bit
more awkward. Who exactly in the Communist Soviet Union was supposed to
fly aboard the Tu-144? The price of a ticket was set at just 37 rubles, not
much more than you'd expect to pay on a regular flight and not nearly enough to
cover operational costs. The 14 Concordes that entered service found a small niche
serving celebrities and the rich, but even with that Concorde itself was still
a commercial failure. The French and the British had poured billions into
developing it even as they knew very early on that they'd never be able to
sell hundreds of Concordes needed to recoup development costs. But the 144
without the same premium niche to fill on the other side of the Iron Curtain,
could only ever be used as a propaganda tool and a prestige project. The Concorde
would ferry passengers for 27 years up until it was retired in 2003. The Tu-144? Well it
was retired from regular passenger service not even a full year after it
started.