Essay season is over, so let’s get back to our regularly scheduled
F A C T S. Last time, we looked at the birth of modern widebody service in
The Three Body Problem. So today, we’re starting another three-part series. We’ll be going through the brief blip in aviation history that was supersonic transport; a time when too much seemed like not enough. So welcome to
Delta V, where we’re gonna start by looking at the first commercial supersonic airliner to enter service – the Concordski (or more formally, the Tupolev Tu-144).
CCCP-77102, which would be destroyed in the 1973 Paris Airshow crash
Whenever supersonic transport is mentioned, the one everyone remembers is the BAC/Aerospatiale Concorde. And for good reason – the Concorde was an exercise in international cooperation and engineering perfection, pushing the limits of what commercial aviation could be. It’s best remembered as the first and last, while the Tu-144 is remembered as a half-baked has-been clone born from industrial espionage and the Cold War rush to outpace the West. And for the most part, that’s exactly what they were. Except for the
teensy fact that the Tupolev actually came first.
Our story starts in the UK, fresh out of World War 2 when Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment commissioned an idea for a supersonic civilian transporter. In the age of the Cold War, it was always about the 1-up. The Soviet Union was looking for every opportunity to not only keep up with the West, but to outpace them in any way possible, and a supersonic airliner seemed like the perfect challenge. The problem was, Soviet engineering was a bit…Soviet. The USSR didn’t quite have the wherewithal to engineer a supersonic airliner from scratch. They'd try a couple of different approaches, including outright asking Lucas and BAC if they could provide engineering assistance. Both companies were working on the Concorde at the time, and the Soviets had hoped that they would share the wealth of knowledge. Naturally, the British government decided to nix that, so the Soviets did the next best thing and straight up stole over 90,000 Concorde technical documents instead.
For all their similarities, there were a few design differences, and the Tu-144 actually made a couple of minor improvements. The Tu-144 featured a “moustache canard” setup, where two elevators could be deployed from the nose to help with low speed handling. The Tupolev also featured a less refined ‘double delta’ wing planform, higher cargo/passenger capacity vs the Concorde, and a parachute braking system. It also featured a distinct lack of inlet control, meaning it always needed afterburners in supersonic cruise, which made it useful for getting to Kazakhstan and nowhere else.
A Concorde (foreground), and a Tu-144 (background) on display in Germany, with the canards deployed on the Tupolev
The first whisperings of the supersonic Tupolev appeared shortly after the first design studies for the Concorde began in 1955. The Tupolev case study was published by the Soviet government in 1962, and the Ministry of Aviation Industry started development the year after. The plan was for five prototypes to be built in four years. And thanks to the wealth of “borrowed” knowledge, the Tu-144 would make it to first flight on December 31, 1968 – a touch over two months before the Concorde.
The Tupolev, to any observer, was a direct clone of the Concorde for obvious reasons. Much of it was a copy and paste job done with Soviet era tech, leading to test airframes breaking up due to metal fatigue at just 70% of their anticipated
normal operating stresses. But the Soviets wanted their party piece, so they pushed on. For every milestone the Concorde reached, the Tupolev would reach it first. It was the first to supersonic flight (June 5, 1969), first to Mach 2 (May 26, 1970), and despite also being the first to crash while at the Paris Airshow (June 3, 1973), it was the first to commercial service (December 26, 1975).
The Soviet Union, by all metrics, had what appeared to be a winner on their hands. They had beaten the Concorde into service (or put the Concorde into service, depending on how you see it). But once you got on board, the differences were drastic. Much of the engineering was done by copying the Concorde without entirely understanding why it was built the way it was. For example, Tupolev opted to use large sections of metal over 19m in length for the fuselage, thinking they were being revolutionary. Instead, the larger segments of fuselage were prone to developing and hiding cracks, failing well below their intended stress limits with no design features to stop the cracks from spreading. And the flying experience was something else entirely.
Tu-144 economy class
When you picture the Concorde, certain associations come up with it. Champagne, caviar, famous clients and fancy suits that cost more than some cars. The Concorde team went all out with their design, striving to exemplify the pinnacle of air travel. But all the Soviets wanted from the beginning was the image. They wanted to be the first. It didn’t matter that interior fixtures would break by looking at them, or that most of the washrooms didn’t work. It also didn't matter that the engines and air conditioning systems were extraordinarily loud, operating near 95 dB in the passenger cabin, which is somewhere between a car horn and a running lawnmower. Interior noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) was so low on their list of priorities that passengers two seats away couldn’t even hear each other shouting and had to rely on passing handwritten notes.
