24 AIRLINER WORLD SEPTEMBER 2017
Minister of Technology John
Stonehouse led a British trade mission
to the Soviet Union and was able to
inspect the prototype Tu-144 in its
hangar at the Zhukovsky airfield.
Stonehouse found the facility primitive,
but was impressed by the “unmistaka-
ble pterodactyl shape” lurking inside.
Among the delegates was Sir George
Edwards, Chairman of the British
Aircraft Corporation, who inspected
the prototype, after which he told
the younger Tupolev: “You’ve got the
intakes and engines in the wrong
place. You’ve got too unsophisticated a
wing design, with no camber or twist.
Although your by-pass engines will
help you when it comes to airport noise,
you’ll lose a lot of efficiency when it
comes to your cruise performance.”
When he added that the engines need
to be put “ just about halfway across the
wing,” Tupolev responded: “I know that,
but we just can’t get the control system
to work with an engine out.”
In fact, both the Tu-144 and Concorde
were having trouble with the issue of
asymmetrical thrust, and much work
was already being done by TsAGI to find
a way to put the engines out under the
wings instead of under the fuselage.
On April 18, 1968, a MiG-21I, called
the Analog, took to the air. It had a wing
shaped like that of the Tu-144 (hence
‘analogous’) to give inflight handling
experience for designers and pilots
alike. The stage was now set for the
first flight of the Tu-144.First Flight
The final week of 1968 was foggy
around Moscow, but December 31
dawned bright, clear and cold. The
senior Tupolev, 80 years old the
previous week, arrived by limousine
to see the 120th (and last) aircraft to
bear his name take to the air for its
maiden flight.The Tu-144 prototype, registered
CCCP-68001, was pulled from the
hangar by a Zil-150 truck, and then
to the runway by a Tatra tractor.
The captain was Chief Pilot Edward
Elyan, 42 years old, born in Baku,
who had also been at the controls of
the maiden voyage of Tupolev’s first
jetliner, the Tu-104.
His first officer was Mikhail Kozlov,
and two flight engineers were V NBenderov (who was head of the entire
test programme) and Yuri Seliverstov.
The interior was empty, and once
inside the airmen donned pressure
suits and strapped into ejector seats.
The deafening thunder of the air-
craft’s take off roll lasted 25secs, and
the flight that followed lasted 37mins.
The landing gear was left down for the
whole flight, but thousands of parame-
ters were recorded to get the testLocals turned out in
force to welcome the
first Aeroflot Tu-144
flight to Almaty.
BORIS KORZIN/
TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES
Tupolev’s finalised
design for the Tu-144S
featured four Kuznetsov
NK-144F engines in
pairs under the wings.
VALENTIN GREBNEV/
TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES
The pair of retractable
foreplanes, added to
counter the pitch-down
force created by the
drooping of the wing’s
trailing edge elevons at
low speed, are nicely
illustrated in this image.
BORIS KORZIN/
TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES