No doubt this Tu-144 airliner will be the highlight of Monino for many people,
even though it's difficult to get photographs because of the aircraft surrounding
it. This is the Russian version of the Anglo-French Concorde
airliner, whose plans the Russians had acquired from the French by a bit
of industrial espionage. The "Concordski", as it was dubbed,
flew two months before Concorde, and had a number of differences from the
Concorde, including a main wing more optimized for high-speed flight, and
a small auxiliary canard wing just behind the cockpit which was extended
at low speeds to improve takeoff and landing performance. The
Tu-144 was about 4 meters longer than Concorde and also had a maximum speed
of Mach 2.35 (2,500 km/h or 1,550 mph) compared to the Concorde's maximum
speed of Mach 2.2 (2,330 km/h or 1,450 mph). Some think that
the French got their revenge when a Tu-144 crashed at the 1973 Paris Air
Show, the theory being that the plane's pilot had to take a drastic evasive
maneuver to avoid hitting a French Mirage chase plane which had been launched
without telling the Russians. Another theory is that the Russians
tinkered with the controls before the flight to allow a faster and more
dramatic rate of climb, which lead to the aircraft stalling and crashing,
killing the entire crew of 6 as well as 8 people on the ground.
In the end the Tu-144 only flew 102 scheduled flights with Aeroflot, about
half of which carried only freight. In 1996 NASA started a
series of flights of a refurbished Tu-144 in order to research the possibilities
of a second-generation supersonic jet airliner, and completed the project
in 1999.
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