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AFTER WEEKS OF rain and fog at Moscow’s Zhukovsky Airfield, site of the Soviet Union’s top flight test center, New Year’s Eve 1968 dawned with more of the same. This was immensely discouraging for members of the flight test team, who had been working feverishly to get the first Tu-144 supersonic transport into the skies by a strict Kremlin-imposed deadline. When the country launched the ambitious program in 1963—placing it in direct competition with the British and French collaboration that spawned the Concorde—Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded that the prototype fly by the end of 1968.

The goal, of course, was to beat Concorde into the air, allowing the Russians to bask in the aura of global aerospace supremacy. The Jet Age of commercial aviation was still in its infancy when both programs launched in the early 1960s, yet the allure of faster-than-sound flight was already capturing imaginations globally—both aircraft promised at least Mach 2 speeds, which would allow flights from Paris to New York in just three-and-a-half hours instead of the eight hours a conventional airliner needed. Now the two programs were neck and neck, and the weather on that cold morning in Russia might make all the difference in who would claim success. The Soviet prototype, developed by the renowned Tupolev Design Bureau, had been ready to fly since December 20, but miserable conditions kept the needle-nose bird grounded.

It looked like that weather would continue through the last day of the year. A window of clear weather briefly opened up, only to promptly close again. A weather reconnaissance aircraft went up shortly after and reported that conditions were promising at only slightly higher altitudes. Minutes later, when the ground fog cleared a bit, 80-year-old Bureau founder Andrei Tupolev gave the go-ahead for launch. Dozens of observers, along with film crews, watched tensely.

Chief test pilot Eduard Yelian and copilot Mikhail Kozlov pushed the throttles forward, waking the four Kuznetsov NK-144 afterburning turbofans. These notoriously inefficient engines would need replacements developed immediately if the fast-moving supersonic transport (SST) program had any hope of meeting its speed and range goals. With a pair of chase aircraft circling nearby, the airplane thundered down the runway and lifted off for a flawless 37-minute inaugural flight. During its trip around the base, it maintained a nose-high angle of attack in order to maximize wing lift at lower speeds, which can be a tricky proposition for an airplane optimized for ultrafast flight. On takeoff and landing, it dropped its long nose for forward visibility—a mechanical trick also deployed by Concorde’s designers. (Both airplanes leveled their noses out during supersonic cruise.) The landing gear remained down, and even though the Tu-144 had forward canards—small wings that extend from behind the cockpit region—to further enhance low-speed lift and controllability, Yelian did not appear to deploy them.

In the Tu-144’s short time aloft, clouds and winds once again closed in, forcing it to land in conditions that one historian described as thoroughly unsuitable for any commercial aircraft. But these were seasoned Soviet military test pilots flying a massive and powerful—if untested—aircraft. Unfazed by the challenge, they made quick work of the landing, shot parachutes out of the tail to slow the aluminum and titanium brute down after slamming onto the runway at 200 mph, and taxied to a triumphant halt in front of the flight test team and cheering company and government observers. (No public, international, or media witnesses were present, which would ensure that if it crashed, the failure could be easily swept away.)

Reg Lancaster

A Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 lands at the 1973 Paris Air Show. The supersonic passenger jet required parachutes to slow it after it touched down, one of the plane’s many compromises.

The next day, news of the flight, announced by Communist Party officials, spread globally, seemingly confirming the Soviet goal of dominance in aviation. Concorde’s first flight wouldn’t happen until March 2, 1969. This was a political victory the nation sorely needed as the United States drew closer to winning the equally supercharged space race.

Achieving that white-hot win on the world stage and appeasing Soviet pride took superhuman effort: bleeding-edge engineering innovations, a breakneck development pace, and likely some international espionage as well. The ruthless determination to get it done led to an impressive aircraft that was larger, faster, and just more badass than anything the skies had seen before. But it also led to oversights—deliberate ones, in some cases—and ultimately to tragedy.

AFTER TU-144 COMPLETED its victory laps that New Year’s Eve, it became increasingly clear that the airliner was a veritable matryoshka nesting doll of flaws baked in during the program’s aggressive development timeline—all of which led to a litany of failures for the 16 copies eventually produced. These setbacks would ultimately challenge Soviet commitment to supersonic aviation even more than the intense pressure it faced from its global rivals.

While the still-in-development Concorde had plenty of its own technological and economic problems, the Tu-144 possessed a rare blend of inherent stability, generally sound design, and a persistent threat of calamity because, well, it was Russian. Ultimately, it was by any reasonable measure the most hardcore commercial airliner ever to take to the skies—mean, angry, and more a product of national pride than any good-faith pursuit of true aerospace achievement. If the Concorde—the progeny of a partnership between Air France and British Airways that led to the formation of aviation superpower Airbus—was an elegant, silky-smooth purveyor of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, the Russians’ effort (sometimes disparagingly called the “Concordski”) was a fire-breathing dragon eager to lay waste to everything in the sky out of pure spite. And it was awesome.

Flaws aside, the Tupolev Tu-144 was indisputably an engineering triumph. After all, its development was set in motion barely 15 years after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in a tiny orange tin can of an X-plane (a Bell X-1) called Glamorous Glennis. The quest for speed accelerated as quickly as the airplanes themselves, with a multitude of military supersonic fighter jets and bombers suddenly crisscrossing the globe. By 1965, at least 58 different Mach-capable aircraft originating from eight different countries had been produced. These included the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft and the canceled but formidable XB-70 bomber.

The Soviet Union didn’t have anything quite as spectacular, just a healthy complement of supersonic fighters and bombers from which to extract lessons. Instead, Tupolev’s SST would be the legend the Soviets sought, their marquee statement. In addition to its unprecedented performance goals, including a top speed of 1,552 mph—or Mach 2.2—and a range of more than 4,000 miles, came the challenges of making a product ostensibly robust, reliable, and safe enough for commercial airline service, a demand no previous military program could meet. The SST needed to lead the way for all aerospace efforts, everywhere.

portrait of aleksey tupolev at paris air show

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Aleksey Tupolev, the son of Andrei Tupolev and the Tu-144’s chief designer, was on site at the Paris Air Show in 1973 when the plane crashed.

“Soviet leaders genuinely wanted the Tu-144 to be better than the Concorde,” says aviation technology historian Steve Harris, a professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. That also meant being better than the Americans. At the time, the United States was also in the SST game, via the Boeing 2707 program, but that effort was eventually canceled in 1971 because it was deemed too expensive and too impractical.

In Tu-144: The Soviet Supersonic Airliner, authors Yefim Gordon and Dmitriy Komissarov describe the seemingly endless technological hurdles that would need to be solved in just a few short years: stability and controllability through all speeds; new heat-resistant structures and the manufacturing prowess to generate them; engines capable of smooth performance at sustained high speeds and with tolerable fuel burns; newly computerized onboard systems; new life-support technologies for flight as high as 65,000 feet; and new avionics that would allow for automated flight.

Not least of all, it would require thoroughly sound and understood aerodynamic principles impacting everything from the engine inlet design to the overall wing and fuselage tail configuration. The strict timeline of the project was such that, in many cases, the design team was relying on advanced theoretical aerodynamic research that was happening quite literally as it was needed. So frenetic was the pace that the first full-scale prototype was airborne before the much smaller analogue test aircraft—built to validate the basic wing design—was ready, requiring any changes to be adapted in later versions. Engines also needed to be created solely for this aircraft, with the substandard NK-144s doing stand-in duty until higher-performing engines could be developed.

FORTUNATELY FROM A safety perspective, the Tupolev Design Bureau had a few “house rules” that it was loath to stray from. These included a requirement for all aircraft that “stability and controllability are to be ensured by the aircraft’s geometry without resorting to automatic stability augmentation systems.” Though it allowed for such enhancements if there was no other means to reach that performance, the core goal of inherent stability drove the design process for the Tu-144, which undoubtedly gave test pilots some measure of comfort.

That meant that dozens of potential design configurations were considered, primarily in the quest for a suitably high-lift wing and a shape that minimized aerodynamic drag. At supersonic speeds, every added mile per hour causes drag to rise exponentially. After all, air is a substance—physical molecules floating in the atmosphere, not some ghostly effervescence that just vanishes when you need it to. Every one of those molecules has to be forcibly displaced in a millisecond in order for 400,000 pounds of aluminum, titanium, steel, and fuel—along with seats and drink carts and humans—to pierce the heavens fast enough.

Challenges beget still more challenges, as the dynamics of supersonic flight have spooky direct and cascading effects that need practical solutions. “The big problem that the Tu-144 had was when an airplane actually goes supersonic, the center of gravity changes,” explains Robert van der Linden, aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “The Concorde had a very sophisticated system to pump fuel fore and aft to change the [center of gravity], but Tupolev couldn’t get that developed.”

Potential configurations to best balance what they knew and what they didn’t ranged from a swept-wing layout with a separate tail assembly, delta wing designs that also had separate tail assemblies (meaning their own vertical and horizontal stabilizers), and delta wings that incorporated elevator controls into the wing. It’s here that most armchair historians suspect that the Tu-144 evolution was copied from that of the Concorde, but that gives short shrift to the years of painstaking research executed by Soviet aerospace experts, led by Andrei Tupolev’s son Aleksey, an equally gifted aerospace designer. His team utilized advanced wind-tunnel and even new water-tunnel studies in addition to painstaking computational analysis. Most of this was done without the benefit of computer technology, which was still new and used only in a few pioneering scenarios in the evolution of the Tu-144 design.

Eventually Tupolev settled on a tailless delta wing configuration, which matched the Concorde designers’ own final choices in a way that’s generally agreed to have been organic rather than a blatant ripoff. There were key differences in size and shaping details, for instance. That’s not to say that espionage wasn’t also a part of Tupolev’s toolbox—it’s widely acknowledged that the Soviets acquired Concorde design documents from individuals with access to the program. One of them, Ivor James Gregory, is known to have passed more than 90,000 documents to the KGB in the late 1960s. But both programs advanced at vigorous paces and were altered constantly, and there’s little likelihood that any captured data would actually be incorporated into either final product. The Soviets most definitely sank considerable blood, toil, tears, and sweat of their own into the development of the aircraft. “The Soviet SST resembled its Western analogue, but it differed in every detail,” writes Howard Moon in Soviet SST: The Techno-Politics of the Tupolev-44. “The Tu-144 design team—which probably tapped the resources of the entire Soviet aircraft industry—was not a slavish imitator and independently developed its own design solutions.”

Virtually nothing in the aircraft was off-the-shelf, even seemingly ordinary airplane components. Landing-gear shocks as well as all other components outside the cooled main cabin needed to withstand the searing heat that reached their housings because of the friction of supersonic flight, which bakes the aircraft structures to 300 degrees. That gear also needed to withstand high-speed landings of more than 400,000 pounds. Paint had to stay on at Mach-2. Windows needed to be unquestionably unbreakable since the cabin was pressurized far beyond that of a conventional airliner flying at half the altitude. Titanium, then a new material for aerospace, was needed for multiple structural hot spots in order to resist melting. All in, Tupolev used more than 80 sophisticated, large-scale test rigs to evaluate individual components of the design.

As serious as the Soviets were about the project, they were less committed to creating a practical, consumer-friendly commercial product. “The Soviets presented the airplane to their domestic population as yet another example of Soviet technology being at the cutting edge of everything. But behind closed doors, they dropped that pretense,” says Harris.

Compromises were abundant and passenger comfort took a back seat. For instance, because the engines didn’t have thrust reversers, the Tu-144 deployed parachutes to slow the aircraft on landing. And thanks to the four constantly afterburning jet engines—Concorde required them only on takeoff—and an excessively noisy air conditioning system to keep passengers from roasting in the heat generated by the physics of Mach flight, the cabin turned out to be a monstrously loud environment. Reliability? Ha. Most of the actual commercial flights required teams of maintenance personnel to travel with the airplane.

Even the potential route options weren’t particularly promising. International rules forbade supersonic flight over populated areas, something Concorde was able to manage thanks to mostly over-water routes. But even though it strived for the same kind of galloping global reach, Aeroflot, the national airline and sole operator of the Tu-144, was never close to being able to send the Tu-144 on glamorous international trips with rock stars and business titans. Instead, its most likely long-term role would be shuttling government employees and mid-level bureaucrats to the farthest reaches of Soviet territory. Even that, however, would ultimately not come to pass.

THE 1973 PARIS Air Show—the marquee event of the global aerospace industry, held at Paris-Le Bourget Airport—should have been the spectacular debut of the Tu-144, its first demonstration on a global stage and its first nose-to-nose meeting with Concorde. Both of the aircraft, as well as their teams, executives, and high-level government dignitaries, arrived ready to impress the crowds.

Air shows like this are predominantly trade shows, with military and civilian customers meeting with aircraft manufacturers, examining hardware and cutting deals. Typically, however, aerial demonstration flights are part of the mix, and in the Paris show those mostly occurred during the two weekend public days at the end of the five-day event. Both Concorde and the Tu-144 performed routines on Saturday and Sunday, June 2 and 3. Concorde’s performance on Saturday was dramatic and impressive, with low passes, full-afterburner climbs, and a landing that used thrust reversers to come to a complete stop rather than having to blast out parachutes as the Tupelov did. The Tu-144 flight crew had meticulously rehearsed their own routine back in Moscow, and while they stuck to their plan on Saturday, historians agree the team was under intense pressure to outdo Concorde’s performance on Sunday. “Just wait until you see us fly,” Kozlov was widely quoted as saying. “Then you’ll see something.”

Clearly, a change of plans had been underway, and on Sunday that played out with ghastly consequences, as witnessed by the 300,000 people in attendance. After completing most of its routine, the Tu-144 crew guided the aircraft down toward the runway, but instead of landing they executed an abrupt, full-afterburner pullback and acceleration into the sky. The crew retracted the landing gear and the forward canards, and appeared to level off at 3,900 feet before immediately entering a steep dive and an accompanying roll. The airplane began to recover from the dive at 900 feet, but right at that moment the left wing snapped off violently and the Tu-144 disintegrated. The plane crashed into the small French town of Goussainville, destroying buildings and killing eight people on the ground, including three children.

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Part of an engine from the Tu-144, which fell on a house in Goussainville, France, after the plane broke apart during a demonstration at the 1973 Paris Air Show.

Tupolev engineer E. Krupyansky, on the team managing both the Tu-144 at the show and the also-new and vastly more conventional Tu-154 airliner, wrote of his experiences that day: “The fact that a tragedy had happened somehow did not immediately sink in. [Test pilot] E.V. Yelian said, ‘What have they done, what have they done?!’ He rushed into the car on duty near us and sped off somewhere, leaving us all at the Tu-154. We were dejectedly silent, each one worried about the tragedy that had happened. We went to the crash site in Goussainville. The town was literally covered with plane wreckage. We were not allowed off the bus because rescue work was going on, and the local population was very agitated by the casualties that had taken place among their fellow citizens. We saw a dead girl being carried past the bus on a stretcher. We were driven to the site of the flight deck, and we took part in identifying the corpses of our comrades. The corpses were severely mutilated and it was quite difficult to identify them. I noticed that [copilot] V.M. Molchanov was strapped to the seat over his shoulder, as is done when performing aerobatics. This belt cut him almost in half.”

From the moment the joint French and Soviet investigation commenced immediately after the crash, it was clear that multiple possible explanations were going to emerge. The Soviets seized on the fact that a French Air Force Mirage III fighter jet had been in the vicinity of the aircraft to capture panoramic images of the exhibition, as the French claimed, or close-up details of the Tu-144 in flight, as the Soviets argued. Either way, it wasn’t known by the Tupolev flight crew to be present, and the Soviets contended that its sudden appearance during a full-throttle, high-angle climbout could have startled Kozlov into sudden evasive maneuvers.

Other theories included concerns about a flight safety control surface restrictor being deactivated before the flight to allow the pilot to execute more dramatic maneuvers, which exceeded the aircraft’s capabilities, and even thoughts that a camera brought by a crew member into the cockpit at the request of a French television station may have been dropped near the pilot’s control stick during the sudden climb, jamming the controls. There was also speculation from different quarters that Western governments sabotaged the airplane either directly, via key bolts being removed from the aircraft, or indirectly, thanks to deliberately faulty data being injected into the stream of stolen documents, thereby causing the Soviets to adopt substandard design and manufacturing strategies. This, it was argued, led to early stress fractures forming where the wing met the fuselage, contributing to the structural failure.

The final report, however, drew no definitive conclusions, citing no defects with the aircraft and merely speculating on potential consequences of the Mirage fighter’s presence and that of the supposed tumbling video camera—which, with no supporting evidence whatsoever, could not be shown definitely to have played a role in the crash.

THE ACCIDENT HAS been controversial ever since, with one team of Russian researchers reexamining the entirety of the evidence in a 1998 report. The researchers argued that the crash could most likely be traced to a combination of factors, including the Mirage entering the Tupolev’s vicinity (though they noted that this alone should not have been fatal for such an experienced crew); a variety of last-minute changes to both the flight plan and the time allotted for it; the related absence of crew preparation and training to accommodate those changes; and the new maneuvers ultimately overstressing the airframe.

The flight plan changes wouldn’t have been a case of Kozlov going rogue and showboating on his own. It would have been discussed and coordinated beforehand at the highest levels, even if in secret. Kozlov, after all, was widely respected as a consummate professional flight test pilot, and historians argue that he likely resisted the changes. Soviet leadership simply pressured the crew to outperform Concorde, with fatal consequences. Nevertheless, the Soviets tried feebly to spin the story afterward. “Oddly enough, with the fatal crash in Paris, it was one of the few commercial aviation accidents they would actually allow to be talked about in Russian media, because they could frame it as Soviet heroism,” Harris notes.

The Soviets lost significant points on the world stage in the aftermath of the accident and never fully recovered. Aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, says Soviet-era airliners were never successful outside the Soviet bloc because they were “just too inefficient.” And the crash sealed their fate. “Any interest any airline may have had outside the Soviet bloc was gone,” he says. “On the other hand, the interest in the Concorde wasn’t very high either.”

That’s the crux of this decades-long, multibillion-dollar effort expended by three countries—four, if you count the presciently truncated false start of the United States. Air show crash or no, the economics didn’t truly make sense on either side, and the success of the two programs that did eventually make it into service rested entirely on how long their governments felt like subsidizing them. In the case of Concorde, the aircraft went a full 30 years before being canceled in 2003, following the 2000 crash of a Concorde into Gonesse, France, just three miles from where the Tu-144 went down.

It’s unlikely the Tu-144 would have fared much better even if the disastrous and deadly 1973 crash in Paris had not occurred, and even if Concordski had somehow outperformed Concorde. “I think the Soviets just saw how much it was going to cost to get the 144 to even approach what the Concorde could do, and they decided it just wasn’t worth it,” says the Smithsonian’s van der Linden. “They needed to put their engineers on more productive, more cost-effective projects that would have a greater impact on the nation and that would be militarily useful.”

The Soviets continued to push the Tu-144 to commercial use, despite several more incidents, mounting technological and reliability problems, and an inability to properly monetize the aircraft in a country where few could afford the tickets. The airplane entered service in 1975, flew only 55 passenger-carrying flights—mostly back and forth between Moscow and Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan—before being retired from passenger service in 1978, and was relegated to cargo transport and research projects for the next several years. It was briefly revived for use as a training tool for the (also failed) Soviet Buran space shuttle, and, oddly enough, as a research craft by NASA while investigating the possible revival of supersonic passenger aircraft flight.

Yet despite the struggle and challenges, despite the nickname and all the espionage, despite its sole purpose as a tool of communist propaganda, despite the appalling in-flight experience, and despite the airplane’s failure to find a place in the global skies, the Tu-144 could be argued, astonishingly, to be a remarkable achievement. It wasn’t good, but it got off the ground. Engineers working on it pioneered critical advances in titanium manufacturing and automated flight, and advanced understandings of high-speed aerodynamics. It was ambitious yet misguided, fierce yet fickle, and, in the end, a groundbreaking supersonic jet with an imperfect and tragic history.

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Eric Adams is a writer and photographer who focuses on technology, transportation, science, travel, and other subjects for a wide range of outlets, including Wired, The Drive, Gear Patrol, Men's Health, Popular Science, Forbes, and others.

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Russia Built a Stunning Rival to the Supersonic Concorde—and Then It Fell From the Sky