Aeroflot - Tupolev Tu-144 Wallpapers

Aeroflot - Tupolev Tu-144: [br]The Tupolev Tu-144 (NATO reporting name: Charger) was a supersonic airliner constructed under management of the Soviet Tupolev design bureau headed by Alexei Tupolev (1925-2001). Western media nicknamed the plane Concordski (sometimes Konkordski), sounding like a Russian surname yet still very close to Concorde, to which Tu-144 bore superficial similarity. A prototype first flew on December 31, 1968 near Moscow, two months before the Concorde. The Tu-144 first broke the sound barrier on June 5, 1969, and on July 15, 1969, it became the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2. The Tu-144 design owed much to industrial espionage, with the Aerospatiale's French factory proving particularly open to infiltration. When Sergei Pavlov -- officially head of Aeroflot's Paris office -- was finally arrested in 1965, he was in possession of details of Concorde's brakes, landing gear and airframe. However another agent, Sergei Fabiew, whose successes included obtaining the complete prototype blueprints, was not arrested until 1977. While such espionage defined the basic shape of the plane and assisted considerably in its development, the 1970 Tu-144 prototype was far from a simple copy, and based on flight tests, considerable changes were made between the prototype and the Tu-144S pre-production model reg 77101. At the Paris Air Show on June 3, 1973, the development program suffered a severe blow when the first Tu-144S production aircraft reg 77102 crashed. While in the air it undertook a violent turn down (allegedly to avoid a French Mirage fighter plane that was, apparently unknown to the Tu-144's crew, escorting it to photograph the SST's innovative canard wings). Trying to pull out of the subsequent dive, the plane broke up and crashed, destroying 15 houses and killing all six on board and eight on the ground. Recent information released from archives shows that the black box was actually recovered to Russia and decoded. The cause of this accident is now thought to be due to changes made by the ground engineering team to the auto-stabilisation input controls prior to the second day of display flights. These changes were intended to allow Tu-144 to outperform Concorde in the display circuit. Unfortunately, the changes also inadvertently connected some factory-test wiring which resulted in an excessive rate of climb, leading to the stall and subsequent crash. [br] [br]

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Aeroflot - Tupolev Tu-144 Wallpapers @ Mega Wallpapers (08 Edition)