Today’s Imitation Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The Soviet Union’s answer to the Concorde was the Tupolev Tu-144. Never was an airliner more obviously produced to imitate a rival. It looked almost identical to the Concorde – many suspected that the KGB stole secret early plans – and was nicknamed ‘Concordski’ as a result; unfortunately, it was nothing short of disastrous. The statistics tell a gruesome but convincing story. The Russian plane flew 102 times, and had 181 hours in service which involved 220 failures, 80 in-flight. Yet in 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev ordered the plane from Alexei Tupolev’s design team, it did not seem all that ridiculous. Not only was Russia still ahead in the space race, but Tupolev had produced the TU104, one of the first jet airliners – though the 104, like so many other Russian jets, had an appalling safety record, with nearly one in five crashing. This was despite the fact that the 104 – like Boeing’s 707 – had the inestimable advantage of being based on a military plane. In contrast, Concordski, like Concorde, demanded entirely novel technical sophistication in the plane, engines and controls.
Typically, Khrushchev imposed a ridiculous timetable: four planes were to be produced within five years so that the plane could be introduced into passenger service in 1967, the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Tupolev did his best, and a prototype was flown at the end of 1968, a couple of months before that of its Anglo-French rival. But the political pressure to show off the Soviet supremacy in supersonic air travel received what amounted to a near-fatal blow when a Tu-144 crashed at the Paris Air Show in June 1973. The plane first dived sharply and then crashed when it tried to pull up, destroying 15 houses and killing all six people on board and eight more on the ground. The causes of this incident remain controversial. A popular Russian theory was that the Tu-144 tried to avoid a French Mirage fighter which was being used to photograph some of its advanced features; the French initially denied a Mirage was anywhere near, perhaps because it was engaged in industrial espionage – later the existence of the Mirage (and the fact that the Russian crew were not told about its flight) were confirmed.
Another theory has the ground engineering team altering certain controls to allow the Tu-144 to outperform Concorde in the display circuit. The changes, so this story goes, also inadvertently connected some factory-test wiring which resulted in an excessive rate of climb, leading to the stall and subsequent crash.
The aircraft was eventually introduced into passenger service on November 1, 1977, almost two years after Concorde, but was clearly unready. Whereas Concorde had been subjected to 5,000 hours of test flying by the time it was certified for passenger flight, the Tu-144 had undergone less than 800. Unsurprisingly, every aspect of the inaugural flight betrayed this haste: ceiling panels were wobbly, service trays stuck, window shades dropped without being pulled, reading lights did not come on, not all the toilets worked, and a broken ramp delayed departure. Things only got worse – so bad, indeed, that the Kremlin actually approached Concorde’s manufacturers for help in improving their air intakes and engine control systems, approaches firmly blocked by the British government.
In May 1978, a Tu-144 crashed while being delivered, and the passenger fleet was permanently grounded after only 55 scheduled flights. In reality Concordski was doomed from the start because of a fundamental failure: the fuselage was composed of large machined blocks of alloys of steel and titanium. This ensured that the slightest flaw would spread throughout the aircraft.
Culled from: Black Box: Inside the World’s Worst Air Crashes
And here’s footage of the Concordski’s air show crash:
Soviet Tu-144 Crashes At Paris Air Show
Arcane Bookshelf Acquisition Du Jour
I went antiquing today and stumbled across this beauty – dating from 1839. I look forward to sharing some arcane excerpts with you in the near future.
