Tupolew Tu-144

Updated: October 2026 – A delta wing with a kink, small extra wings behind the cockpit and a nose that tilts downward: the Tupolev Tu-144 is the Soviet supersonic airliner and was in the air before Concorde. You won’t see one fly anymore; the type has been history since 1999. This page shows what spotters can do with it today: the technology, the differences between prototype, Tu-144S, Tu-144D and Tu-144LL, every airframe built with its registration, and the places where you can find the surviving examples. The detailed story of its origins is told in the magazine article Tupolev Tu-144.

What is the Tu-144?

The Tu-144 is a four-engine supersonic airliner from the design bureau Tupolev. It was developed in the 1960s as the answer to the British-French Concorde project, which is why it quickly got the nickname “Konkordski” in the West. NATO listed it under the reporting name Charger. The production aircraft were built at the Voronezh aircraft plant, while testing and research took place at Zhukovsky airfield near Moscow. Tupolev’s legacy is now part of the United Aircraft Corporation.

On December 31, 1968, the prototype СССР-68001 took off on its first flight, a good two months before Concorde. In the summer of 1969 the Tu-144 was also the first airliner to fly faster than sound. In scheduled service, though, it never really arrived: Aeroflot used it for mail and cargo from December 1975 and carried passengers only from November 1977 to June 1978. You can read more about the environment it came from in Soviet airliners.

Technology: the Soviet route to Mach 2

The task was the same as for Concorde: carry around 100 passengers at twice the speed of sound over long distances. The solutions differ in several points, and exactly these differences make the Tu-144 so fascinating in a museum.

The double delta wing

The prototype still flew with a simple delta wing. For the series, Tupolev designed a double delta: the leading edge is more strongly swept on the inside and less so on the outside, with a visible kink in between. The wing is also cambered. This improved behavior in supersonic flight and increased lift at low speed. The wing area grew from a good 438 square meters on the prototype to around 506 square meters on the Tu-144D. There is no horizontal stabilizer; control is via elevons on the wing trailing edge.

The canards behind the cockpit

The most striking feature of the production aircraft is the fold-out canards right behind the cockpit. Because of their shape, they are often described as a “mustache.” On takeoff and landing they extend sideways and provide extra lift at the nose. This noticeably lowers the landing speed and makes the aircraft easier to trim at a high angle of attack. In cruise they lie folded against the fuselage. Concorde got by without such auxiliary wings.

Nose and cockpit

As on Concorde, the nose can be lowered so the crew can see the runway on takeoff and landing despite the steep angle of attack. Three people sat in the cockpit. The cabin was long and narrow, with small windows; depending on source and seating, 100 to 140 seats are cited.

Engines and nacelles

On the prototype, all four engines sat in a single block under the fuselage. That caused problems with heat and the air inlets interfering with each other. In the series they moved into two separate nacelles, two engines side by side in each, but still close to the fuselage center. The air inlets are very long and angular, with movable ramps that slow the air down to subsonic speed before the compressor.

The variants took different paths with their engines:

• Tu-144S: Kuznetsov NK-144A, a turbofan with afterburner. For supersonic cruise the afterburner had to run, fuel consumption was high and the range correspondingly short.
• Tu-144D: Koliesov RD-36-51, a single-flow turbojet without afterburner that worked much more economically in cruise. With 15 tons of payload the Tu-144D managed around 5,330 kilometers.
• Tu-144LL: Kuznetsov NK-321, the engines of the Tu-160 bomber, installed for the NASA research program.

Sources give very different thrust figures, so we deliberately avoid a single number here.

Variants at a glance

With only 16 completed aircraft, almost every Tu-144 is one of a kind. Roughly five groups can be distinguished.

Variant	Registration	Number	Special features
Prototype	СССР-68001	1	simple delta, no canards, engines in one block, shorter fuselage
Pre-production	СССР-77101	1	transition to the series configuration
Tu-144S	СССР-77102 to 77110	9	double delta, canards, separate nacelles, NK-144A with afterburner
Tu-144D	СССР-77111 to 77115	5	RD-36-51 without afterburner, longer range
Tu-144LL	RA-77114	1 (conversion)	NASA research aircraft with NK-321

The prototype looked much simpler: a simple delta wing with a span of just under 27.7 meters, no canards, one engine block under the fuselage and a main landing gear with more wheels per leg. For the series the fuselage was lengthened by several meters, the wing redrawn and the engine installation rebuilt. That makes the Tu-144S essentially a new aircraft that only took over the concept from the prototype.

The Tu-144S was the version that carried mail and cargo for Aeroflot from 1975 and passengers from 1977. The Tu-144D came about because the S version’s range was not enough for longer routes. One aircraft, the 77105, was later converted to the D standard. You can hardly tell the variant from the outside; the surest way is to look at the registration.

The Tu-144LL (LL stands for “flying laboratory” in Russian) was created in the mid-1990s from the stored 77114. In a joint program with NASA it flew a total of 27 research flights between 1996 and 1999 to collect data for a possible second generation of supersonic airliners. The last flight took place in April 1999, after which the Tu-144 chapter in the air was over.

Service and end

The road into scheduled service was bumpy. On June 3, 1973, the Tu-144S 77102 crashed during a demonstration at the Paris Air Show over the town of Goussainville. All six people on board and eight people on the ground were killed. How the airshow works today is explained in the article Paris Air Show at Le Bourget.

On December 26, 1975, Aeroflot started mail and cargo service between Moscow and Alma-Ata, a route of around 3,100 kilometers. Passengers were not allowed on board until November 1, 1977. After just 55 passenger flights, it was over again on June 1, 1978. A few days earlier, on May 23, 1978, the Tu-144D 77111 had made an emergency landing near Yegoryevsk after a fire on a test flight before delivery; two flight engineers died.

From June 1979, the Tu-144D flew cargo once more, also on longer routes such as Moscow–Khabarovsk. Production ended in 1983, and the last airframe, 77116, remained unfinished. After that, the remaining aircraft served mainly for research and testing, until the Tu-144LL set the final point in 1999.

Every Tu-144 with its registration

The list is your tool for collecting: registration, variant and whereabouts. The status is as of October 2026. For some stored airframes the condition is not clearly documented; those are marked “presumably.”

Registration	Variant	Whereabouts (as of October 2026)
СССР-68001	Prototype	scrapped at Zhukovsky
СССР-77101	Pre-production	scrapped at Zhukovsky
СССР-77102	Tu-144S	crashed at the 1973 Paris Air Show
СССР-77103	Tu-144S	scrapped at Zhukovsky
СССР-77104	Tu-144S	scrapped at Zhukovsky
СССР-77105	Tu-144S, converted to D	presumably scrapped
СССР-77106	Tu-144S	Central Air Force Museum Monino
СССР-77107	Tu-144S	on display in Kazan
СССР-77108	Tu-144S	aviation museum in Samara
СССР-77109	Tu-144S	presumably stored in Voronezh
СССР-77110	Tu-144S	Civil Aviation Museum Ulyanovsk
СССР-77111	Tu-144D	crashed near Yegoryevsk in 1978
СССР-77112	Tu-144D	Technik Museum Sinsheim
СССР-77113	Tu-144D	after engine damage in 1980 later scrapped
СССР-77114	Tu-144D / Tu-144LL	on display at Zhukovsky
СССР-77115	Tu-144D	on display at Zhukovsky
СССР-77116	Tu-144D	unfinished, presumably in Voronezh

The Cyrillic “СССР” corresponds to the Latin “SSSR,” but spotter lists usually write it “CCCP.” After the end of the Soviet Union, the Tu-144LL carried the Russian prefix RA-. If you are collecting registrations, it pays to note both spellings.

Museum examples for spotters

Since no Tu-144 flies anymore, every sighting is a museum visit. Six of the seven aircraft on display are in Russia, one in Germany.

Germany: The Tu-144D 77112 at the Technik Museum Sinsheim is the only example outside the former Soviet Union. It came to Sinsheim in 2001 on an elaborate journey over water and land, not on its own flight, and has stood on the roof in Aeroflot colors ever since. Right next to it stands the Concorde F-BVFB. Nowhere else can you see both supersonic airliners side by side. Sinsheim forms a pair with the Technik Museum Speyer, and many visitors combine both. More destinations in the country are collected in the overview Aviation museums in Germany.

Russia: The other examples on display are spread across the Central Air Force Museum Monino (77106), Kazan (77107), Samara (77108), Ulyanovsk (77110) and Zhukovsky (77114 and 77115). The 77114, the former Tu-144LL, has been back in its original livery since 2019. Travel to Russia is currently heavily restricted; check the current travel advisories beforehand. Strict rules also apply there to photography at airfields, more on that in Photography bans in Russia and Belarus.

How to record such visits cleanly is shown in Documenting sightings. You can find more classics for your list in Spotting rare aircraft and Identifying vintage aircraft in the sky.

Tu-144 or Concorde?

In Sinsheim the two stand side by side, and in photos they are often mixed up. With these features you can be sure.

Feature	Tu-144D	Concorde
First flight	December 31, 1968	March 2, 1969
Wing shape	double delta with kink	ogival, curved delta
Canards	yes, fold-out	no
Engine nacelles	close to the fuselage center	farther out under the wing
Length	around 65.7 m	61.66 m
Wingspan	28.8 m	25.6 m
Passenger service	1977 to 1978	1976 to 2003

So the Tu-144 is bigger than Concorde but spent only a fraction of the time in scheduled service. The story of its Western counterpart is told in The history of Concorde.

The Tu-144 in the Tupolev family

The Tu-144 stands between two worlds of the manufacturer. On the civil side, the same house produced the first Soviet jetliner, the Tu-104, the short-haul classics Tu-134 and the medium-haul workhorses of the Tu-154. On the military side, the supersonic bomber Tu-160 is the closest relative – its NK-321 engines powered the Tu-144LL. The long-haul counterpart from the rival design bureau is the Ilyushin Il-62, which carried Aeroflot’s long-haul network in the 1970s.

Conclusion

The Tu-144 was in the air earlier than Concorde, but in service only briefly. Double delta, canards and the closely spaced nacelles make it unmistakable, and the registration tells the story of each airframe. With seven examples on display it is a manageable but appealing collecting goal – and the easiest one to reach, in Sinsheim, is right in Germany.