Ed Dartford
Well-Known Member
What is the worst plane ever made?
The Tu-144
This is what happens, kiddos, when you steal notes from the nerds without doing any due diligence!
The Tu-144 was supposed to be the USSR’s answer to the Concorde and the then-not-cancelled Boeing 2707. It was rushed into service, to allow the USSR to get bragging rights over getting their sh!tbox into service before Concorde. It was technically faster, and carried more passengers.
However, the plane’s flaws were manifold:
Firstly, the plane needed fuel hungry afterburners to stay at its Mach 2.2 cruising speed, which made its range absolutely hopeless; just 6,000km, which is simply not good enough for this type of plane. Concorde, by contrast, had a range of well over 7,000km, allowing it to fly across the Atlantic.
Secondly, the plane was hideously uncomfortable, with the plane’s rushed roots resulting in a much more primitive cooling system that generated phenomenal levels of noise; passengers recall being unable to talk to the people next to them, being forced to either shout or otherwise pass notes. You thought being on a 747 with a screaming baby was bad? The Tu-144 will make that baby sound like Tchaikovsky by comparison!
Thirdly, it was hilariously unreliable. The plane only ever made 105 flights, and in those 105 flights, there were 80 of them where a major mechanical malfunction occurred, with blind luck and/or the pilot’s bravery being the only things that stopped the plane from becoming a crater in Kazakhstan.
Finally, landing the beast was a complete nightmare, with a drogue parachute being required just to bring the thing to a halt without doing a runway overrun.
Note: If your plane requires bloody drogue parachutes for a scheduled passenger service, you may want to rethink your design…
The 144 only ever had one scheduled route, from Moscow, Russia to Almaty, Kazakhstan. And this route was only once per week, in spite of there being 8 available aircraft. Yep, the Soviets claimed a “regular” service was available, without mentioning that said service was the bare minimum required to qualify as “regular”, much like the UK’s parliamentary trains. Goes to show how little confidence even the Kremlin had in this boondoggle of a plane.
But for the real kicker, the plane’s design was deliberately flawed. As it turned out, the KGB’s Directorate T had spied extensively on the Concorde program. Eventually, the French engineers were able to get a rough idea of who the moles in their group were, and began using this to their advantage, by supplying deliberately flawed blueprints to the spies. Famously, a sample of “tire scrapings” was given to a spy, who didn’t know that, in fact, he’d been sold a dummy; the rubber sample would, if brewed up in any significant quantities, have the consistency of bubble gum.
All of this eventually led to the Tu-144’s biggest disaster, and on the world stage: The Paris Air Show disaster.
In 1973, Concorde and the Tu-144 met in Paris for the biannual airshow, in front of the cameras of the world. Concorde’s pilots put on a fantastic show, with a daring maneuver at the end which pushed the Concorde far beyond its usual comfort zone.
The pilot of the Tu-144 fired up his heavy beast, determined to outshine the Concorde, and this is where things went wrong.
As it turned out, the pilot of the 144 pushed his plane to its absolute theoretical limits in order to put on a better show; however, what he hadn’t known was that his plane was simply not capable of going through what he wanted it to do; as it turned out, the 144’s panels were, in ground testing, failing at approximately 70% of their listed yield values. His plane, made of substandard panels, simply disintegrated around him, crashing to the earth in a gigantic fireball. All 6 on board were killed, as were 8 on the ground; one victim, a 12 year old boy practicing his violin, was decapitated by a piece of flying debris.
A plane which manages to have 2 crashes and 80 serious mechanical failures in just 105 flights, over half of which were cargo-only due to Soviet Leadership’s total lack of confidence that the plane would even work after they ordered it rushed into service, must rank as one of the worst planes ever built.
The Tu-144
This is what happens, kiddos, when you steal notes from the nerds without doing any due diligence!
The Tu-144 was supposed to be the USSR’s answer to the Concorde and the then-not-cancelled Boeing 2707. It was rushed into service, to allow the USSR to get bragging rights over getting their sh!tbox into service before Concorde. It was technically faster, and carried more passengers.
However, the plane’s flaws were manifold:
Firstly, the plane needed fuel hungry afterburners to stay at its Mach 2.2 cruising speed, which made its range absolutely hopeless; just 6,000km, which is simply not good enough for this type of plane. Concorde, by contrast, had a range of well over 7,000km, allowing it to fly across the Atlantic.
Secondly, the plane was hideously uncomfortable, with the plane’s rushed roots resulting in a much more primitive cooling system that generated phenomenal levels of noise; passengers recall being unable to talk to the people next to them, being forced to either shout or otherwise pass notes. You thought being on a 747 with a screaming baby was bad? The Tu-144 will make that baby sound like Tchaikovsky by comparison!
Thirdly, it was hilariously unreliable. The plane only ever made 105 flights, and in those 105 flights, there were 80 of them where a major mechanical malfunction occurred, with blind luck and/or the pilot’s bravery being the only things that stopped the plane from becoming a crater in Kazakhstan.
Finally, landing the beast was a complete nightmare, with a drogue parachute being required just to bring the thing to a halt without doing a runway overrun.
Note: If your plane requires bloody drogue parachutes for a scheduled passenger service, you may want to rethink your design…
The 144 only ever had one scheduled route, from Moscow, Russia to Almaty, Kazakhstan. And this route was only once per week, in spite of there being 8 available aircraft. Yep, the Soviets claimed a “regular” service was available, without mentioning that said service was the bare minimum required to qualify as “regular”, much like the UK’s parliamentary trains. Goes to show how little confidence even the Kremlin had in this boondoggle of a plane.
But for the real kicker, the plane’s design was deliberately flawed. As it turned out, the KGB’s Directorate T had spied extensively on the Concorde program. Eventually, the French engineers were able to get a rough idea of who the moles in their group were, and began using this to their advantage, by supplying deliberately flawed blueprints to the spies. Famously, a sample of “tire scrapings” was given to a spy, who didn’t know that, in fact, he’d been sold a dummy; the rubber sample would, if brewed up in any significant quantities, have the consistency of bubble gum.
All of this eventually led to the Tu-144’s biggest disaster, and on the world stage: The Paris Air Show disaster.
In 1973, Concorde and the Tu-144 met in Paris for the biannual airshow, in front of the cameras of the world. Concorde’s pilots put on a fantastic show, with a daring maneuver at the end which pushed the Concorde far beyond its usual comfort zone.
The pilot of the Tu-144 fired up his heavy beast, determined to outshine the Concorde, and this is where things went wrong.
As it turned out, the pilot of the 144 pushed his plane to its absolute theoretical limits in order to put on a better show; however, what he hadn’t known was that his plane was simply not capable of going through what he wanted it to do; as it turned out, the 144’s panels were, in ground testing, failing at approximately 70% of their listed yield values. His plane, made of substandard panels, simply disintegrated around him, crashing to the earth in a gigantic fireball. All 6 on board were killed, as were 8 on the ground; one victim, a 12 year old boy practicing his violin, was decapitated by a piece of flying debris.
A plane which manages to have 2 crashes and 80 serious mechanical failures in just 105 flights, over half of which were cargo-only due to Soviet Leadership’s total lack of confidence that the plane would even work after they ordered it rushed into service, must rank as one of the worst planes ever built.
