Why Wasn't The Tupolev Tu-144 A Commercial Success?

Quick Links The Soviet Union has a history of aircraft that could have been great Tu-144 had a myriad of problems The Paris Air Show crash and the project was disbanded Whenever we talk about Russian aircraft marvels that weren't great commercial successes, such as the Tupolev Tu-144 , aviospace.org's phrase that the Tupolev TU-144 was " designed and (im)perfected in the USSR " really strikes a chord. The Tu-144 was the first supersonic aircraft to take to the skies.

After all, the Russians had beaten Concorde by a rather slim margin of four months. Despite being the first aircraft to touch the speed of Mach 2, the Tupolev Tu-144 failed to become a commercial success. The aircraft didn't enjoy the same levels of success as its Anglo-French counterpart.



The Soviet Union has a history of aircraft that could have been great The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has imperishable distinctions in the field of aviation and space. These include: Yuri Gagarin (a cosmonaut from the USSR) was the first to enter space. Valentina Tereshkova (a cosmonaut from the USSR) was the first woman to enter space.

Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was put into space by the USSR in 1957. However, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the USSR had also designed aircraft that could be discussed as staggering failures. Let's look at a few examples: The Kalinin K-7, which, according to reports , was "intended to serve a multiplicity of purposes ranging from carrying passengers and cargo, or even acting as a bomber or heavy transport .

" The Caspian Sea Monster, one of the most eye-catching aircraft that rose from its grave after three decades of dormancy, reported CNN . To this list we can easily add the Tu-144, as the aircraft was dubbed " the most successful failure in aviation history " by Flightline Weekly . Tu-144 had a myriad of problems The Tupolev Tu-144 registered a total of 102 flights only.

Out of these, merely 55 carried passengers. Only 16 aircraft of this type were ever built. The Tupolev Tu-144 was often dubbed to be a "Concordski", a name that was redolent of Concorde, which clocked thousands of flights.

The USSR wasn't as technically adept as the West. It was reported by AeroXplorer that spies stole a lot of documents regarding Concorde to the USSR: " Among the documents secretly sent to the Soviet Union were the designs for Concorde's Rolls Royce Olympus 593 engines. The two-part film "Concorde: The Race for Supersonic" goes into great detail describing how a Soviet spy, nicknamed "Agent Ace", ".

..handed 90,000 pages of classified records to the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

.." As the USSR felt the need to beat the West in producing the first supersonic jet, it introduced the Tu-144 but it wasn't as technologically agile as an aircraft of such magnitude would have demanded.

Tu-144 was noisy and uncomfortable for passengers The Tu-144 was equipped with four Kuznetsov turbofan engines. The noise of these engines, coupled with the noise of the air conditioning, meant that one passenger was barely audible to the other, forcing passengers to communicate with each other using notes. This was noted to journalists onboard the Tu-144 on January 25, 1978.

The journalists also reported that seating on the aircraft was cramped. The Tu-144 wasn't structurally sound The Tupolev Tu-144 has a pair of winglets (“canards”) right behind the cockpit. These helped the aircraft achieve extra lift.

What it also meant was that the aircraft could be handled well at low speeds, reported CNN . Despite such unique features prompting Ilya Grinberg, a Soviet aviation expert and engineering professor at Buffalo State University, to confide to CNN that the Tu-144 was not a result of espionage, the Tu-144 wasn't as good as its Anglo-French counterpart. The Tu-144 was a tad heavier than Concorde: Tu-144 was around 20 tonnes heavier than Concorde.

The Tu-144 had twelve wheels underneath the wings and two at the front. The additional wheels in the Tu-144 added to its higher weight. Some of the other areas where the Tu-144 wasn't as good as Concorde include: Inferior engine control.

The aerodynamics of the Tu-144 were not as good. The braking system was inferior. FlightLine Weekly reports that there were efforts made to make the Tu-144 as good as Concorde, but to no avail: "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." The Tu-144 had a compromised range and a higher fuel consumption Unlike Concorde, the Tu-144 could only sustain supersonic flights with afterburners. This meant that the Tu-144 had a higher fuel consumption than its counterpart, making it less profitable for airlines.

Aeroflot operated a fleet of the Tu-144, but the first flights with the airline simply carried mail, instead of offering passenger service. Nationalinterest.org reports that the Tu-144 was sued for services between Moscow and Kazakhstan because Aeroflot didn’t want to risk a crash by flying over cities.

The Tu-144 also had a range that was 400 nautical miles lower than that of Concorde. One of the more interesting things that has recently surfaced about the aircraft, as reported by CNN is that " each flight from Moscow could only depart after the aircraft had been personally inspected by the plane’s designer, Alexei Tupolev himself. " The Paris Air Show crash and the project was disbanded In 1973, the Tu-144 suffered a crash that raised concerns in the aviation community (and beyond) about the operability of the Tu-144.

During the Paris Air Show of the year, the Tu-144 took off, only to break up in mid-midair and crash in a nearby village. The incident resulted in the death of fourteen people in total. NASA flew the Tupolev Tu-144's final flights as a testbed to develop the next generation of supersonic passenger aircraft.

During the earlier days of the operations, Tu-144 recorded more than 200 failures, 80 of which were during the flight. The world hadn't learned as much about the environmental concerns related to supersonic travel back then. Khusii Vaidya, an environmentalist at Kathmandu University, reported to avisopace.

org about the scale of pollution of supersonic travel: "...

aircraft, like Concorde, fly at high altitudes (16-23 km) where the ozone layer resides (18-45 km). These aircraft emit nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are known to contribute to ozone depletion in the lower stratosphere. Concorde’s engines emitted significantly higher quantities of sulfuric acid particles than the exhaust produced by subsonic aircraft.

These sulfuric acid particles were subsequently determined to be a contributing factor in the depletion of the ozone layer." In light of such a scale of pollution, one might feel that the Tu-144 would have later been disbanded on environmental grounds anyhow. History, however, says that the Tu-144 was built too soon, too hastily, and a lot of money was squandered rather incompetently by the USSR on what could have been a worthy rival of Concorde.

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