Airliner World — September 2017

22 AIRLINER WORLD SEPTEMBER 2017

T

he 1960s was a decade of
technocratic futurism in the
Soviet Union, flush as it was
with a string of space-age
achievements.
Its successes included Sputnik in
1958; the Vostok programme, which
was the first to put a man in space
(Yuri Gagarin) in April 1961; and the
first female cosmonaut (Valentina
Tereshkova) in June 1963.
Technology as an antidote for societal
ills captured the imagination of the
Soviet elite – and what could be a better
dividend to be paid out to the masses
in a country that covered one-sixth
of the world’s landmass than a
supersonic airliner?

Super sonic

The world’s first, heaviest and biggest supersonic airliner

took to the skies on the last day of 1968 and six months

later, on June 5, 1969, accelerated through the

sound barrier for the first time. The machine in

question is not Concorde. This is the story

of the Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144, as

told by Charles Kennedy.

Soviet Style

toilet on the Ostend-Warsaw Express

train, and using Aeroflot couriers on

scheduled flights.

In Britain, two Kodak workers

were tried for espionage at an Old

Bailey trial in February 1965, and

the same month, Aeroflot’s Paris

station manager, Sergei Pavlov

was arrested in a Paris restau-

rant with a napkin containing

secrets on landing gear,

brakes and high-tech met-

allurgy. French President

Charles de Gaulle was

so infuriated that he

insisted on person-

ally signing Pavlov’s

expulsion papers.

However,

accusations of

imitation are an

Cold War Games
Supersonic airliner information was
among the most sought-after in the cat-
and-mouse game of Cold War spying.
The Soviets even had a name for their
intelligence-gathering efforts against
the Anglo-French Concorde: Operation
Brunnhilde.
Brunnhilde’s greatest coup involved
Sergei Fabiew, a high-level French
technocrat and son of a White Russian,
who provided Concorde’s entire tech-
nical documentation on microfilm to
TsAGI (The Central Aerohydrodynamic
Institute). It was shuttled to the Soviet
Union in a hidden compartment
behind a heating grill in the first-class