I finaly managed to get one of those elusive 1/100 VEB/plasticard Tupolev Tu-144…!
And for a decent price too, on e-Bay.
Having built this kit before, it’s a very basic, crude kit, but I’m hoping to turn it into something slightly better looking and will eventually display it with Doyusha’s 1/100 Concorde that I got from J-Hulk… I might even backdate the Concorde to turn it into the prototype (rather than a pre-production airframe), since this Tu-144 is a prototype too (not the briefly-operational Tu-144D…)
The Tu-144 was retired from commercial use in '78 following a crash during a test flight. This was the second crash of a Tu-144 following the much more ‘public’ one at the Le Bourget airshow in '73. Out of 17 Tu-144 built, possibly three were then used by the Air Force for further tests, while the other were kept either in museums or in the open air. One was modified by Boeing/NASA in the mid-90s and used as a test bed in '96-97. At least one Tu-144 is exhibited abroad, in Germany, next to Concorde.
Despite the bad publicity and all, the Tu-144 was not an exact copy of Concorde. The Soviet plane was considerably larger, and would have carried 250+ people while Concorde was a 100 seater. The wing was very different too, some saying the Soviets were not able to copy the workmanship of Western engineers. The '73 crash in Paris certainly showed that the Tu-144 was not structurally as sound as Concorde, as the engines shut down and the airframe broke up in conditions where Concorde would have survived, however, it is also thought that that accident was caused by a French Mirage III flying, incognito, very close to the Tu-144; the Soviet pilot, trying to avert collision, put his aircraft into a fatal position… The official investigation cleared the airframe and put the blame on the crew, but the ‘cover-up’ was needed by the French government because several French people died on the ground when the Tu-144 crashed, and because the Soviets did not want to reveal that their pride was not structurally sound…
I read in some detail a book which covered the whole story of the development of Concorde in some detail. According to this book, because the Russians were trying to spy on the Concorde team to gather information for their own aircraft, a dummy design team was set up to feed the Russians false data. There is a theory that part of the reason that “Concordski” was an unsound design was that they were too heavily reliant upon this information. It was only after Concorde was actually unveiled and flew that they were able to get a proper look at the true design.
