Tupolev Tu-144: The Soviets' doomed rival to Concorde (2017)
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edit There's a metal staircase: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/btze9j/my_picture...
The stairs aren't easy to make out from that photo. Here's another photo that shows the metal staircase: https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/btze9j/my_picture...
I did not. Please assume good faith. That image was linked by someone else in the thread. [0]
Why would I deliberately seek out a photo that doesn't clearly show the staircase, only to then edit my comment to link to another image that does?
> your initial comment comes off as a snark
I don't know how I could have phrased the question to be any more neutral.
It is a much bigger plane on the outside than you might think. That wing is huge.
You used to be able to go inside the test flight one, but it’s a cramped space, so things might be different while covid regulations are in force.
[1] https://www.toulouse-visit.com/aeroscopia-museum
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy
With the advent of lie-flat business class seats in the late 90s and early 2000s, Concorde became much less appealing since one could just fly a redeye to London and have a comfortable sleep than be cramped for a shorter period of time.
[1] http://www.rusaviainsider.com/zhukovsky-pays-tribute-venerab...
The runway worker went to the French authorities, and a phone call to Michelin was placed: "Give us the very worst tire compound you can come up with." A batch was whipped up, and our runway worker sent some samples of it on to his KGB handler. Needless to say, their tire problems persisted.
Also espionage spying was common then (probably still is today)
> ...an alarm siren went off immediately after takeoff, with sound and volume similar to that of a civil defence warning. The crew could not figure a way to switch it off so the siren stayed on throughout the remaining 75 minutes of the flight. Eventually, the captain ordered the navigator to borrow a pillow from the passengers and stuff it inside the siren's horn.
And there is a flip side. Bomber gaps, missile gaps, the MiG-25 fiasco, that time the CIA double-counted bombers because the russians painted different tail numbers on either side ... America gobbled up its share of false intelligence too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...
https://www.boredpanda.com/abandoned-soviet-space-shuttle-pr...
Ironically, a blown tire caused the fatal crash that led to the demise of Concorde. It struck debris, but there are always eerie similarities between western and russian programs.
All done in the early 70s. These units started to fail in the 90s and they had to bring folks out of retirement to produce new units.
The Soviets struggled to crack this aspect and apparently approached UK Gov to license the tech. Unsurprisingly UK Gov said no as the tech was classified as it could be used by military aircraft too.
They had to figure out the design of the 'spikes' and engine inlet systems that controlled inflow to the engines for the aircraft that still holds many speed records (Mach 3), to this day [1]. It was an enormous engineering challenge.
I think this work was all done in the 60's.
0 - https://internationalaviationhq.com/2020/08/29/ben-rich-fath...
Canada even built nuclear reactors in Romania during the Cold War years.
You don't have to match exact speeds to match outcomes when it comes to bombing. What matters is what the platform is meant to achieve and how effective is it at its mission. A slower supersonic plane may be the superior overall platform, depending on the other aspects of the plane.
Russia made a hyper expensive show pony, when they could have built a cheaper, more effective platform at a lower speed. That's usually the kind of mistake the Americans make. The relatively high max speed of the TU-160 turned out to be entirely meaningless, they would have been better off building a different plane.
The TU-160 has a $200m+ price tag. That's $1.2b scaled to the US economic terms. It's something beyond hyper expensive for the Russians in relation to their economic capabilities and military spending.
The B-1A was cancelled. The TU-160 should have been cancelled.
Scaling prices of Soviet inventions to US economic terms using Russian prices is really, really absurd.
Does it really need to?
Carrying 100 tons of bombs at mach 2... where?
A single F-18 can easily carry a 2Mt nuke, or two, mounted on some standoff missile with decent range on itself.
And USA, unlike USSR, has a network of friendly countries to host their airforce, and aerial refuelling infrastructure spanning the whole world.
Tu-144 was doomed by the whole system of socialism - and not really in a bad way. In a classless Soviet society there were no people for who paying 5x for the ticket to get 2.5x speed would be justified just because there was no mass inequality. In the west, there were some of those people and for a while (1980s and 1990s) that was enough for profitable operation of planes that came for free - but even then, that wouldn't work out if the airlines had to pay for planes.
If was an expensive toy West could somehow afford for a while, but Soviet Union couldn't.
That limited initial orders and almost killed the project until it was slightly relaxed enough to allow some flights to New York.
This sort of cynical approach to government and lack of dedication to public service is exactly what I see now taking root in the United States. Get to the feeding trough and grift your heart out. It's f--ing tragic.
Which are carried by interceptor aircraft - meanwhile the long-term shift was clearly towards anti-aircraft missiles., and stealth was only a few years away. At this point the F/A-117 was already pretty far along in development.
> And 35 years later the West is still unable to match Tu-160
Unable to match what? Aircraft is designed to serve a use case. B52 is planned to remain in service until at least 2050s, despite not winning any records. SR71 is a dazzling aircraft that is universally admired, yet none are in service today.
War isn’t a pissing contest to see who can have the fastest X, it is rather one where you find a bunch of most effective tools for the job.
Low flying approaches and cruise missiles were strongly reconsidered at the the because the MiG-31 had look-down shoot-down capability. We don't know if it would have been a better or worse option, we're dealing in counterfactuals.
Russia has few uses for the Tu-160 anymore. It's main use was to penetrate hostile airspace of near peer opponents. Since the fall of the USSR yes there is not much more use for that.
At the risk of “arguing with someone on the internet”, I think you may have your chronology backwards, since it seems the Tu-160 was designed to match the US aircraft you mention.
The Valkyrie was a late 1950’s to early 1960’s design with physical prototypes existing and flying by 1964.
The B-1A design began in 1965, with the first flight in 1974. This would have been the closest western analog to the Tu-160, since the B-1B derivative had a different focus - low-altitude terrain following - since it was believed that the high-altitude/high speed designs like the B-1A were vulnerable to newer Soviet missile designs. Stealth was also becoming increasingly important to US command due to the same concerns about missiles.
The design competition that begat the Tu-160 began in 1972, with a first flight in 1981. I’m not saying it’s not a great plane - by all accounts it is very capable - but US designs were not done in response to it.
A300 in particular was so ahead of its time that American airlines saw it as being too good to be true. An airliner much safer, efficient and reliable than any counterpart couldn't get a single sale for years until Airbus gave a few to Eastern Airlines for free (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln-ffJM9sJc).
Concorde was not an Airbus aircraft. Tech developed for Concorde was not the same fly-by-wire that ended up in the A300 line. The A300 line is very good, but would have (probably) existed without Concorde and the money pissed away on Concorde by Aerospatiale and BAC did nothing for either company other than weaken them and lead to BAC disappearing into BAE. (BAE, the weakened Aerospatiale and what was left of Messerschmidt previously had been pushed by their respective governments to join into Airbus.)
When BAC still existed as an independent company in the late 60s it lobbied the UK government to not support the A300 program and instead tried to push its own competing civilian airliner. Maybe if Concorde was not such a failure then Aerospatiale might have been able to continue on its own and BAC would not have been forced to be acquired by BAE and become a part of the Airbus group. In this imagined reality both would have continued as national aerospace champions in civilian planes in addition to their military work, but we will never know.
Parent is correct, Concorde was a first step towards Airbus. European governments knew that there was too many aircraft manufacturers and they saw the need for mergers. France and UK are the leading europeans aircraft manufacturers, that made sense to start with a franco british venture. Many of the Concorde staff later worked for Airbus, like Henri Ziegler, and refined the concorde technology.
The reality is that the Concord was very good at one thing, getting across the North Atlantic at speed. But it was much worse for almost anything else since it lacked the range for longer crossings (it had about half the range of a 747), and wasn't a good option for subsonic overland travel, and consumed more fuel per passenger per mile.
They haven't failed, it has been exactly the opposite. Which is of course why the global immigration magnet is so incredibly strong toward those nations.
Those societies, the more affluent democratic ones you refer to, have been hyper progressive and prosperous for the average person since the WW2 era.
A middle class person since ~1950-1960 in Austria, Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Slovenia, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand (and numerous others) - have largely led quite comfortable lives compared to what it was like in the past. Life has gotten better in most every regard if you're in those nations vs pre WW2.
You can even watch this progress happen in rapid fashion, in eg the Baltics or the former Czechoslovakia, as they're quickly joining the more affluent tier post Soviet rule. The same is true in South Korea, China, Taiwan in terms of non-elite progress. The progress by the non-elites in those nations has been breathtaking over a very short period of time (30-40 years).
Monino is one of the more amazing aviation museums I have seen. There are some extremely rare aircraft on display, including my favorite, a Mil V-12 [3]
You can hire a former pilot who was stationed at the base to give you a tour. They can speak some English, but if you speak a little bit of Russian the stories become a lot more interesting!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monino_Airfield
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/55°50'12.0%22N+38°10'12.0%...
For a brief moment I imagined a different world to the one I experienced in my youth, in which the Cold War, with all its cliched animos stereotyped rivalrous ranting that filled every newspaper and news bulletin for three decades, was replaced by a good faith chivalrous respect.
It felt good. The world was a better, more interesting, more productive place.
That's why I still don't get moon landing conspiracy theories.
My (uncharitable) explanation is that it gives a comforting sense of control and understanding of the world to be part of an in-group that has simple explanations for every outsider’s (potentially complicated and technical) objections.
Concordski: What ever happened to Soviets' spectacular rival to Concorde? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19021153 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
Here is a photo of the beauties: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Concorde...
A good telling of the story here: https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/b-29-to-bull/
But - I'm no "Sovietologist", so do enlighten me if I'm wrong about this!
Another such project was Buran/Energia, which while not a carbon copy of Space Shuttle was an outcome of matching "what the Americans have".
But yes, the USSR almost outdid the USA on star wars, if it weren't for some software error.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XgCRnqwpg
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...
More details on the project in this article (in Russian) https://warspot.ru/19630-tayny-polyusa
Buran had other interesting features, like non-toxic propellants and longer ability to stay on orbit. It's not that Soviets always learned from their mistakes and made better systems - sometimes they couldn't, and sometimes the problems were internal to the system, like grounding of TKS after Chelomey's death - it's that sometimes this approach did lead to improved results. Soviet engineers were quite capable in aerospace.
Regarding economics of Tu-144 flights. I've heard that economics of civil aviation in USSR was rather weird - political pressure dictated having civil aviation, economical realities dictated subsidizing most - not only Tu-144 - flights to keep them affordable, yet this approach also had side benefits in keeping industry, which essentially was tailored for military orders, occupied with projects, testing, maintenance, learning, education of specialists, even international sales.
I am not quite convinced about the test limitations for the Polyus station; I mean according to Anton Chechov, that (laser) gun in the picture would have to shoot, at some point. Maybe that would have resulted in much earlier conflict between the political leadership and the military industrial complex, who knows. They mentioned that that they had the Buran launcher fuelled up and ready for launch, while attempts were ongoing to push the decission for the test launch through, I mean that sounds like of lots of politics was going on behind the scene, assuming that this exercise would have a significant risk and cost a non trivial amount of money.
Buran doesn't use integrated reusable engines with the external tank, so there's no awkward mix of solid boosters. Plus, Buran has a fully functional emergency ejection seats for all crew members. More so, the Buran had automated flight from the outset and meant that Buran could be lauched without anyone and be landed fully automatic.
Energia could be launched by itself, and carry about 100 tons which is about 3 times the shuttle's capacity, and being a seperate system makes so much more sense than the booster + fuel tank mix of the Space Shuttle system.
In general, Buran, from an engineering point of view, was a fantastic piece of work and although might have been inspired by the Shuttle initially, it definitely improved on the Shuttle design.
It's truly sad that the Buran was discontinued only after one flight. It deserved more time in the sun to shine.
BTW, country dachas was not exactly a marker of a bureaucrat class. More precisely I believe there were two classes of dachas - small summer homes for common people and 'nomenklatura' dachas for people with personal drivers.
and though it too was stratified (to bureaucrats with country Dacha's etc.)
It wasn't so stratified to mention it explicitly. Everyone had more or less the same lifestyle. And many had Dacha's, not just bureaucrats. Also, if you'd seen those dachas...
E.g. four years ago I visited Stalin's dacha on the lake Ritsa. I'd say that average house of the current Russian middle class is much bigger and more luxurious than Stalin's dacha. And he was the leader of the USSR.
Thing is, you don't have to be ultra-rich to feel good about yourself. You just need to be substantially richer than the next guy. And no party functionary (let alone Stalin) ever had any lifestyle issues. Dachas, yachts, personal chefs - it's par for the course until your fellow party members take you out with a pickaxe or something to free up the spot.
Rural/urban gap was very real though but with each decade more and more people were able to live in the cities due to extensive housing program.
Around 1990-1991 there was a popular sentiment in Ukraine that we are feeding the whole Union etc, something similar was in Russia (that they subsidize other republics), the reality was a bit of a mixed bag
I don't think so. It's probably a propaganda of the new independent Ukraine government since 1991. Many of my relatives are stuck on Ukraine now because they moved there during USSR times because life there was better. They'd be happy to return to Russia, but they're old and they are citizens of Ukraine and if they sell their property in Ukraine, they'd be unable to buy real estate in Russia, so it's almost impossible for them to return. And they regret that dearly because of politics of nazism and poor state of economy.
Not all republics in USSR were equal, but differences weren't as big as they're now. And contrary to what current propaganda says, most prosperous republics were Baltic republics and Georgia. USSR was investing a lot of money in those republics to buy loyalty. You can find numbers in the USSR statistics. For example, USSR paid more for milk from farmers in Baltic republics than it cost in the grocery shops.
It was a big mistake to invest in those countries. Now they hate us the most despite all that effort and money poured there by Russia.
Apparently taking away the profit motive didn't work.
And the closest to successful version, the Concorde, was never profitable but propped up with heavy .gov funding from the French and British governments.
It could hardly be unpleasant and unreliable, because it never was completed and never flew.
As for uneconomic, sure. That's a common result of it being a government project, just like the Concorde.
That's why .gov dropped their funding and cancelled it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707#Government_funding...
The funding was cut because it was uneconomic and environmentally damaging.
The env damaging part was only over land and there were plenty of niches for it. It could have done just fine over oceans. Late 70s/early 80s would have loved an SST going west coast to Japan and Hawaii.
I'll need a cite for (1) and (2). I don't believe it.
You can see some of this today in B-1 lancers, which are very much known for being rough rides, and are pretty close to a half billion dollars a piece compared to <$100M for a B-52 which is significantly closer to airliners wrt design philosophy and cost, and reliability (the B-52 has something like an ~80% ready rate, compared to the B-1's ~50% ready rate).
The Tupolev was an absolute engineering masterpiece given the constraints it operated under. This thing had to transport regular people and land at practically any airport, something Concorde never did.
No, it wasn't a masterpiece - it was plagued by usual Soviet issues: poor quality and bad engines.
And no, it wasn't intended to transport regular people and land at practically any airport.
Photo five, featuring a Tu-144 with a US and Russia flag on it. Ah the brief optimistic days before the Cold War resumed. There are even a smattering of Hollywood movies over that span of time where the Russians and Americans work together in friendly fashion. When you view those movies now (eg Air Force One 1997), it seems entirely bizarre, from some fantasy world. Movies before: Soviets, Cold War, enemies; during the thaw: yay, Russia, democracy, friends, hugs all around; after: Putin, Cold War, quasi-enemies.
The videoclip has lots of footage of the plane. https://youtu.be/t09R_uTrvlw
> Крыло самолета (удлинения 1,74 и сужения 7, многолонжеронной конструкции) состоит из основной и отъемных частей и имеет кессонную конструкцию с силовой нагруженной обшивкой в виде фрезерованных крупногабаритных панелей вафельной конструкции из высокопрочных алюминиевых сплавов.
"The wing consists of the main, and detachable part, and has a caisson construction with load carrying honeycomb panel skin machined from high strength aluminium alloy"
So, a correction there. The wing is made of two ennormous machined parts: the main wing, and the wing extension.
Крупногабаритных just means "large/big sized".