Until 1932, Le Bourget was the only airport in Paris. Its tracks are loaded with history. Charles Lindbergh landed there after his transatlantic flight and from there took off, two weeks later, L'Oiseau blanc, a biplane that intended to repeat the feat of the American in the opposite direction and which disappeared without a trace.
With the opening of Orly and, later, of the ultra-modern Charles de Gaulle, Le Bourget lost importance until it was relegated to private flights and the home of the Air and Space Museum. Every odd year, the Aeronautics Show is held there, where hundreds of manufacturers from all over the world gather to exhibit their novelties.
During the Cold War, this event was one of the favorites for the USSR to display some of its most iconic vehicles. In addition to military and civil aircraft, in 1967 the Soviets presented a model of the rocket that took Yuri Gagarin into space. Until then it had been a mystery. It was the first time that the public could see it in detail.
Continuing this custom, in 1973, the USSR exhibited a copy of its Tupolev-144, the rival supersonic aircraft of the Anglo-French Concorde. Apart from its technical acronym, it had no name, but everyone would know it as the "Concordosky", due to the many similarities between one and the other.
It is true that the laws of aerodynamics imposed a very similar design, but it could almost be said that they were twins. The few differences seemed to play in favor of the Russian: it was a little longer, heavier, more powerful, it flew faster, it was taller and it could carry more passengers. At least on paper.
Still, it was impossible to avoid the suspicion that the Tu-144 was “inspired” by the Concorde plans (courtesy of the KGB). Although some assured that, given the result, they must be the plans of a defective model.
And it is that, under its futuristic appearance, the Russian plane presented many problems. The most obvious, the noise. Both planes took off using afterburners (by injecting fuel directly into the exhaust nozzle of their engines), but the Concorde shut them down after ten minutes, while its competitor had to keep them on for the entire flight if it was to sustain its supersonic speed. . The extra consumption greatly reduced its autonomy.
The Anglo-French aircraft was far superior in terms of avionics, aerodynamic adjustments and use of advanced materials. Its brakes, for example, used carbon fiber parts that could withstand landings at 300 kilometers per hour without locking up; the Tupolev, with a more conventional mechanism, was helped by a braking parachute.
However, the Russian plane had been the first to be built, a requirement of the competition between the two powers to demonstrate their technological preeminence. Despite the fact that the project started seven years behind the Concorde, the instructions of the USSR Council of Ministers were very clear: the deadline was 1968. And the Tupolev complied: the first prototype flew on December 31 of that year. . The Concorde would do it two months later.
In the summer of 1973, both competitors were engaged in a battle for customers, although regular flights had not yet started. Hence the interest in showing them to potential buyers in the showcase offered by Le Bourget.
On June 3 – it is now exactly half a century old – an in-flight display of the two supersonics was scheduled. First, the Concorde, which was limited to executing a series of smooth and uncompromising maneuvers. Among them, a low pass followed by a very sharp angled ascent to three thousand meters.
The six crew members of the Tu-144 were eager to demonstrate the superiority of their aircraft, if necessary risking more than the Concorde. It was Sunday, with the hall open to the general public: a quarter of a million spectators, including the designer himself, Alexei Tupolev.
It seems that he himself had given instructions to improve the plane's agility, disabling a safety system that prevented the control surfaces from exceeding an angle of five degrees at low speed. It didn't seem like a risky move, considering that one of the more experienced test pilots would be at the controls.
The Tu-144 took off with all the roar of its four engines and circled over the field, executing more demanding rolls and maneuvers than the Concorde. It then returned to simulate a touchdown and lift off again. It would do so after retracting the landing gear and deploying the canards, two small "whisker"-like auxiliary wings behind the canopy that improved low-speed lift.
Just past the runway, the pilot Mikhail Kozlov accelerated and pitched the plane trying to gain altitude while retracting the "whiskers". Still with both flaps half folded, he stalled. Freed from its five-degree limitation, the electronic stabilizer moved the elevons (control surfaces) to their maximum ten degrees, forcing a sharp dive.
Perhaps it was also the result of a programming error in the on-board computer. The fact is that Kozlov tried to open the canards again and regain lift, but the maneuver was too violent. One of the engines caught fire, and the fuselage broke apart before it even hit the ground.
Another theory suggested that the pilot was distracted by seeing a Mirage fighter flying about a hundred meters above, of whose presence he had not been warned. The accident report does not mention him, perhaps because, it is said, his objective was industrial espionage: photographing the Russian's canards in the open position, an element that was never incorporated into the Concorde.
The Soviet apparatus fell in the nearby town of Goussainville. It destroyed a dozen houses and caused eight deaths and dozens of injuries. No crew member survived.
The disaster affected public perception of the Tu-144 and its competition with the Concorde. Although both were plagued by serious technical challenges and business problems, the image that the Concorde was safer and more reliable greatly dampened Aeroflot's enthusiasm for the new aircraft.
The Soviet Union suspended flights of the Tu-144 and made modifications to its design to address identified technical anomalies. It began to be used as a freighter between Moscow and Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan, at the end of 1975. It would not receive certification to transport passengers until two years later.
Commercial commissioning would bring up new problems. Already on the inaugural flight, the departure was delayed half an hour due to a breakdown in the boarding system, a detail that drove the brand new Vice Minister of Transport, present at the event, out of his mind.
Sometimes the anomalies began to appear even before takeoff. Service carts that barely fit between the seats, detached interior panels, self-closing window shades, and out of order toilets.
One flight suffered a partial cabin decompression; another, a failure notice – fortunately erroneous – in the deployment of two of the three landing gear struts, which would have meant a “belly” landing. On another occasion, the main alarm siren was sounding for more than an hour without the pilots being able to turn it off, until the captain managed to silence it by "drowning" it with a passenger's pillow.
And, above all, the noise in the cabin. The incessant roar of the jets made conversation impossible even between two adjoining seats. The only way to communicate was by passing written notes.
Of the sixteen examples built, only two were adapted to transport passengers, always on the route between Moscow and Alma Ata. The frequency was once a week, and almost never with all its places sold. At full load (fifteen tons) it barely had a range of three thousand kilometers, just enough to reach its destination with almost empty tanks. By cutting the weight in half, I was getting an extra five hundred reassuring miles.
The Concorde was twice that distance. Thus, she could cover more profitable destinations, such as New York, Washington, Bahrain or Rio. Always with the supersonic flight limited to ocean sections, avoiding the sonic boom over inhabited areas. Given the high price of the ticket (about three thousand dollars), its main clients were businessmen with high purchasing power, a segment of the population that –at least in theory– did not exist in the USSR.
On its planes, Aeroflot only offered a single class, but Tu-144 passengers had to pay a 25% supplement on the amount of a normal ticket. Presumably an attempt to offset the inordinate cost of the kerosene that gobbled up tons.
In May 1978 the company suspended the service. Even subsidized it was ruinous. In total, only fifty-five flights had been carried out, with an average occupancy of fifty-eight passengers (the cabin had seats for one hundred and forty). All the copies were withdrawn and most ended up as museum pieces.
A Tu-144 was modified to be used as a flying laboratory where to experiment with the behavior of aircraft at high speeds. In 1998, it made twenty-seven flights as part of a collaboration program with NASA in studies prior to the design of a second-generation supersonic. But, once again, realism prevailed, showing that this project did not promise to be profitable either.
The Concorde, meanwhile, flew for a quarter of a century. British Airways and Air France operated seven aircraft each to regular destinations. In July 2000, one of them crashed shortly after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle airport, with the loss of passengers and crew. That also marked the beginning of the end for an aircraft symbol of the national prestige of the French and British.
