Tupolev Tu-144: the Soviet supersonic icon and the Le Bourget crash

It was faster into the air than Concorde, faster through the sound barrier and faster at Mach 2 – and yet its story is above all one of missed chances. The Tupolev Tu-144 was supposed to secure the Soviet Union a lead in supersonic passenger travel. Instead, one image burned itself into aviation’s collective memory: the crash on June 3, 1973, in front of a large crowd at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget. This article tells the story of the Tu-144 from development through the Goussainville disaster to its short scheduled service – and shows you where you can still photograph the Soviet supersonic icon today.

The Tu-144 in brief

The Tu-144 was a four-engine supersonic airliner from the Tupolev design bureau. Developed from 1963 as the Soviet counterpart to the Anglo-French Concorde, it flew at the end of 1968 as the world’s first supersonic airliner. Only 16 aircraft were completed. Aeroflot used it from 1975 for mail and cargo and from November 1977 to June 1978 for passengers between Moscow and Alma-Ata. Two serious accidents, high fuel consumption and technical problems ended its career early. The last Tu-144 landed in 1999, and today the type is purely a museum piece. Technical details, variants and all registrations are in the profile of the Tupolev Tu-144.

A Cold War race

In the early 1960s, it was settled that Britain and France would build a supersonic airliner together. For the Soviet Union, this was a challenge, technical as well as political: An aircraft of its own in this class promised prestige and was meant to show that the Soviet aviation industry could keep pace with the West. In July 1963, the Council of Ministers gave the green light, and the Ministry of Aviation Industry officially ordered the development on July 26, 1963. The goal was ambitious: several flight-capable prototypes within a few years and a first flight still in 1968.

The project was entrusted to Andrei Tupolev’s design bureau, with his son Alexei Tupolev leading the program. The task matched that of Concorde: carry around 100 or more passengers at roughly twice the speed of sound over long distances. For the enormous distances within the Soviet Union, this sounded especially tempting – routes from Moscow to Central Asia or the Far East would have shrunk to a fraction of the flight time. How the Tu-144 fits into the series of other types from the East is shown in the overview of Soviet airliners.

New Year’s Eve 1968: the first flight

On December 31, 1968, the prototype СССР-68001 took off from the test airfield near Moscow. Test pilot Eduard Elyan was at the controls. That made the Tu-144 the first supersonic airliner ever to fly – roughly two months ahead of Concorde, whose prototype 001 took off in Toulouse on March 2, 1969.

The next milestones also went to the Tu-144. On June 5, 1969, it broke the sound barrier as the first airliner, with Concorde following in October. On May 26, 1970, it reached Mach 2 as the first airliner. As propaganda, this was a success. Technically, though, behind the early start was an aircraft that still had many weaknesses and had to be fundamentally reworked for production.

Milestone	Tupolev Tu-144	Concorde
First flight	December 31, 1968	March 2, 1969
First supersonic flight	June 5, 1969	October 1, 1969
Cargo and mail service	from December 26, 1975	–
Passenger service	November 1977 to June 1978	January 1976 to October 2003
Aircraft built	16 completed	20
Operators	Aeroflot	Air France, British Airways

From prototype to production: almost a new aircraft

The prototype had a simple delta wing, and all four engines sat in a common block under the fuselage. This arrangement caused problems with heat and airflow. For the production version, the Tu-144S, Tupolev therefore largely rebuilt the aircraft:

• Double-delta wing: More sharply swept inboard, less so outboard, with a visible kink in the leading edge. This improved handling in supersonic as well as slow flight.
• Canards behind the cockpit: Small, retractable extra wings provided lift at the nose during takeoff and landing and lowered the landing speed. In cruise, they lay folded against the fuselage.
• Separate engine nacelles: Two engines each now sat in their own nacelle, still close to the middle of the fuselage.
• Longer fuselage: The production aircraft were significantly longer than the prototype and offered more room in the cabin.

As on Concorde, the nose could be lowered so that the three-person cockpit crew could see the runway on the steep approach. The Tu-144S was powered by Kuznetsov NK-144A engines, which needed afterburner in supersonic cruise. That made the aircraft thirsty and severely limited its range – a problem that stayed with it throughout its career. Only the later Tu-144D with Kolesov RD-36-51 engines without afterburner went considerably farther.

June 3, 1973: the crash at Le Bourget

The 1973 Paris Air Show was meant to be a showcase. At Paris-Le Bourget Airport, both supersonic airliners showed themselves to the public. On June 3, Concorde flew its demonstration first, then the Tu-144. The competition between the programs was tangible to every spectator.

At the controls of the Tu-144S СССР-77102 was test pilot Mikhail Kozlov, next to him co-pilot Valery Molchanov, with six people on board in total. After a low pass with landing gear and canards extended, the crew accelerated at full power and pulled the aircraft steeply upward. At altitude, the Tu-144 abruptly went into a steep descent. In the attempt to pull out at low altitude, the structure was overloaded: The left outer wing broke off, and the aircraft broke up in the air and caught fire.

The wreckage fell on Goussainville, a municipality north of Le Bourget. All six people on board died, and on the ground eight people died, including three children. Numerous residents were injured and more than a dozen houses destroyed. It was one of the worst accidents in the history of the Paris air show. How the show runs today and which safety rules apply to demonstrations is explained in the article on the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget.

The search for the cause

A joint French-Soviet commission investigated the disaster. Its result surprised many: It found no evidence of a fault in the aircraft’s design or systems. It named no clear cause. To this day, therefore, there are several attempts at an explanation that stand side by side.

Most often cited is an evasive maneuver. A French Mirage jet was nearby to photograph the Tu-144. The crew may have suddenly seen it and swerved abruptly. This is linked to a crew member who is said to have been standing in the cockpit with a camera and who may have fallen during the maneuver – with consequences for the controls. It fits that the crew deviated from the previously agreed demonstration profile.

Other theories speak of an object that could have blocked the controls, or of a fault in the control electronics. The ambition to outdo the Concorde demonstration is also often named. None of these variants is proven. Precisely because the files never produced a clear picture, speculation has swirled around the crash to this day – factually, all that can be said is that the cause officially remains open.

Scheduled service: seven months with passengers

Despite the setback, the program continued, but enthusiasm in Moscow had noticeably cooled. On December 26, 1975, Aeroflot began service – at first only with mail and cargo between Moscow and Alma-Ata, today’s Almaty in Kazakhstan. The route of roughly 3,100 kilometers suited the limited range of the Tu-144S.

Soviet type certification followed in October 1977, and from November 1, 1977, passengers were allowed on board as well. Operations remained modest: a few flights per week, a single route and a fleet that needed a lot of maintenance.

On May 23, 1978, the next blow came. On a test flight before delivery, a fire broke out in the new Tu-144D СССР-77111 after a fuel line began to leak. The crew had to shut down engines and landed the aircraft in a field near Yegoryevsk southeast of Moscow. Two flight engineers were killed. Shortly afterward, on June 1, 1978, passenger service ended. In total, the Tu-144 had completed 102 flights in scheduled service, 55 of them with passengers on board. According to Russian specialist literature, a good 3,200 passengers flew on them.

Tu-144D, research flights and the end

The more economical Tu-144D returned to cargo service once more from June 1979 but no longer carried passengers. Interest in the expensive program faded, and in the early 1980s the government decided to end it. The last airframe, 77116, remained unfinished at the Voronezh plant. The remaining aircraft served from then on for research and testing.

The Tu-144 enjoyed a late renaissance in the 1990s. For a joint research program with NASA, the stored Tu-144D 77114 was converted into the Tu-144LL, a flying laboratory with NK-321 engines that otherwise power the Tu-160 long-range bomber. From the end of 1996, it delivered measurement data for a possible second generation of supersonic airliners. In 1999, the program ended for lack of funding – and no Tu-144 has flown since.

Where you can see the Tu-144 today

Of the 16 completed Tu-144s, several examples survive. For spotters in Germany there is good news: One of them stands in the Kraichgau region, right by the A6 motorway.

Location	Registration	Note
Technik Museum Sinsheim, Germany	77112 (Tu-144D)	in the museum since 2001, next to Concorde F-BVFB since 2003, the only example outside the former Soviet Union
Central Air Force Museum Monino, Russia	77106 (Tu-144S)	in the museum’s outdoor area east of Moscow
Ulyanovsk, Russia	77110 (Tu-144S)	in the Civil Aviation Museum
Samara, Russia	77108 (Tu-144S)	at the state aerospace university
Kazan, Russia	77107 (Tu-144S)	displayed outdoors
Zhukovsky, Russia	77114 and 77115 (Tu-144D)	the 77114 is the former Tu-144LL, back in Aeroflot paint since 2019

In Sinsheim, the Tu-144 and the Air France Concorde stand in takeoff pose on the roof of an exhibition hall – a one-of-a-kind duo worldwide that you can photograph in a single visit. The Tu-144 did not come to Germany in 2001 under its own power but by transport. The museum belongs to the group with the Technik Museum Speyer. Which other venues are worth a trip is shown in the overview of aviation museums in Germany. The story of the neighbor on the roof is told in the article on the history of Concorde.

In Russia stand all the remaining examples. Travel there is currently severely restricted, so check the current travel advisories beforehand. In addition, strict photography rules apply at airfields – more on that in the article on photography bans in Russia and Belarus.

At Le Bourget, no Tu-144 commemorates the crash, but the place is still a must-visit for history fans. At the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace stand two Concordes, and from the museum grounds at the airport you see today’s business aviation traffic.

If you collect registrations of rare types, the article Collecting registrations has ideas for building your project, and Documenting sightings covers how to record museum visits cleanly. The article Spotting rare aircraft presents more rarities.

What remains of the Tu-144

The Tu-144 shows how closely technology and politics were intertwined in the Cold War. The early first flight was a prestige win, but the pressure to be faster than the West came at the expense of maturity. The crash at Le Bourget made the program’s weaknesses visible before the eyes of the world, even though its cause was never resolved. In scheduled service, it remained an episode of a few months.

Soviet civil aviation afterward relied on subsonic types like the Tu-154, which formed the backbone of Aeroflot for decades. Tupolev’s legacy now belongs to the United Aircraft Corporation. For spotters, the Tu-144 remains a special collector’s item: You will never see it fly again, but in Sinsheim you can get as close to it as to hardly any other classic.

Conclusion

The Tupolev Tu-144 won the race into the air but lost the race into everyday service. First supersonic airliner, first above Mach 2 – and yet only 55 passenger flights, overshadowed by the crash at Le Bourget in 1973 and the accident of 1978. After cargo service and NASA research, it landed for the last time in 1999. Today a handful of museum aircraft tell its story, one of them in Germany.