as fast as any modern-day airliner. And you'd do it in style while sipping

champagne. Wait a minute... This isn't Concorde!

This is the only other supersonic jet to ever carry commercial passengers.

No, this isn't Concorde. This is the Soviet Union's Tupolev 144.

And yes, it looks like the Concorde but flying on this thing was nothing

like the Concorde. The Tu-144 was kind of like the Concord's crazy older sister.

She was loud, uncomfortable and a little dangerous. But the 144 story is

definitely worth telling. It clearly knocked off a lot of the

Concord's design - just look at - it but it actually did some things better, like

carry more passengers, it even flew faster. But ultimately the 144's story is

about faking it. About deceiving the world. In the 1960's the race to build a

supersonic passenger jet, well it was more than about just flying fast, it was

about asserting superiority for both the Soviets and the West. And the race to be

the first actually started as a three-way between the Americans with

their half-baked Boeing 2707, the joint British-French Concorde, and the Soviets

with their Tu-144. The Americans ruined their shot by tying themselves up in

bureaucracy and cost overruns, this put the Concorde project firmly in the lead.

The Soviets who had more primitive technology had a lot of catching up to

do, so they relied on good old Soviet ingenuity.. oh and they stole a whole

bunch from the Concorde program. Early on Soviet spies made out with over 90,000

technical documents on the Concorde and other aircraft so they caught up to the

Concorde program and the 144 took flight two months before Concorde

It's obvious the Concorde was designed around passenger experience. Journalists

marveled at how quiet and smooth supersonic flight was and how flight

attendants had no trouble chatting up passengers while they served martinis. In

the 144? Well caviar and champagne were also brought out, but Western journalists

fixated on the cramped seats, window shades that would suddenly drop without

being pulled, and that some of the bathrooms weren't even working. The 144's

more primitive engines and cooling system worked together to produce a

sound so loud that passengers couldn't talk to one another. Instead they had to

pass around handwritten notes and playing pass the note with other

passengers must have killed some of the opulence. Not that flying on the 144

was ever going to be a normal experience. The plane only ever saw passenger

service on a single lonely route between Moscow and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The thing

is the 144's engines burned so much fuel, it couldn't actually fly much

further, it couldn't even cross the Soviet Union. Compare that to the

Concorde, its route spanned continents and oceans and the Tu-144 flew only once

a week, even though there were seven more certified and ready for service. This

shows how confident Soviet leaders were in the 144. Out of 102

scheduled flights there were 226 mechanical failures, 80 of which were

serious enough to delay or canceled the flight altogether. The possibility of 144

crashing with passengers on board was a huge political risk. From

the very beginning the one full force air worthiness was in serious question.

It crashed in front of thousands of spectators during the 1973 Paris Air

Show. Then again in 1978 when a cargo version

went down after a fuel line rupture. And yet again in 1981 one suffered an engine

explosion, forcing an emergency landing. The problem was the Tu-144 had clearly

been rushed in its development. Getting this thing built before the Concorde was

more important for the Soviets than actually building it well, and the 144's

engineers had fewer resources and inferior technologies. But still, you

gotta hand it to them for actually getting it done. The Concorde's design

team had state-of-the-art rolls-royce olympus engines with computer-controlled

engine inlets that allowed for something called super

cruise. So once Concorde reached supersonic

her fuel thirsty after burners could be switched off while still maintaining

supersonic. Tu-144 engineers had to make do with engines that needed continuous

afterburners to maintain supersonic. The Concorde had a sophisticated wing

optimized for both supersonic and low-speed flying, the Tu-144's wing was

really only good for supersonic, so pilots had to land the 144

at higher speeds, making for brutally hard landings that even required a

parachute. The Soviets worked around their wing limitations by designing

canards, little deploy-able wings at the front of the aircraft which would

improve low-speed stability. But all the innovation on both sides of the Iron

Curtain couldn't overcome the reality that supersonic travel was just too

expensive. In the capitalist West you could price Concorde tickets at 5 or 6

times what a regular flight would cost, so the Concorde became about glitz and

glamour, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain things were a little bit

more awkward. Who exactly in the Communist Soviet Union was supposed to

fly aboard the Tu-144? The price of a ticket was set at just 37 rubles, not

much more than you'd expect to pay on a regular flight and not nearly enough to

cover operational costs. The 14 Concordes that entered service found a small niche

serving celebrities and the rich, but even with that Concorde itself was still

a commercial failure. The French and the British had poured billions into

developing it even as they knew very early on that they'd never be able to

sell hundreds of Concordes needed to recoup development costs. But the 144

without the same premium niche to fill on the other side of the Iron Curtain,

could only ever be used as a propaganda tool and a prestige project. The Concorde

would ferry passengers for 27 years up until it was retired in 2003. The Tu-144? Well it

was retired from regular passenger service not even a full year after it

started.