Airliner World — September 2017

26 AIRLINER WORLD SEPTEMBER 2017

and performed an impressive, if
truncated, display. Kozlov brought
the big jet down to perform a low pass
with gear, flaps and canards extended,
then lit the afterburners and climbed
steeply away.
At 3,000ft the aircraft was evidently in
trouble. The nose dropped severely and
the jet was in a rapid descent, close to
the ground. A high-G pull up was initi-
ated but it was more than the airframe

• any airframe – could take. The left
  wing folded and the rest of the aircraft
  rolled inverted, then exploded in front
  of 300,000 onlookers including most of
  the world’s aviation community.
  The village of Goussainville – less
  than four miles from where Air France
  flight 4590 would crash 27 years later –
  was like a war zone. An engine
  straddled a garden; a piece of wing
  fell in the courtyard of the town hall;
  the cockpit demolished a house; burn-
  ing fuel ran in the streets and ignited
  houses and cars. All on board were
  killed as well eight villagers, with more
  than 60 seriously injured.
  The cause remains hotly debated
  today. It is generally accepted that a
  French Mirage fighter jet, probably
  filming the Soviets’ display, came very
  close to CCCP-77102, surprising its
  pilots into a violent evasive manoeuvre,
  when they were already disoriented
  by the shortened slot times that had
  required them to depart from the
  routine that had been practised at least
  six times back at Zhukovsky.

A contributory factor was that French

TV journalist Michel Tauriac had tried

to accompany the flight, but flight

engineer Benderov had stopped him,

instead taking his camera and promis-

ing to film inflight on Tauriac’s behalf.

It is thought that the unsecured camera

fouled the first officer’s controls, delay-

ing the recovery from the evasive dive.

Entry into Service

Back at the production site in

Voronezh, an American delegation

arrived, invited prior to the Paris crash.

They were impressed by the scale of

the project, seeing five aircraft under

construction and subassemblies for

a dozen more arriving from subcon-

tractors. Mikhail Mikhailov, Deputy

Director of the Ministry of Aviation

Production, indicated that Aeroflot had

ordered 30 Tu-144s, with total orders

anticipated to be 75.

Routes planned for the Tu-144S were

“high-priority industrial traffic” from

Moscow to Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and

Khabarovsk in 1975. A second tranche

of five routes were planned – to those

three cities from Leningrad (now St

Petersburg), plus Moscow to Tashkent

The engineer’s station

is a mass of switches

and dials.

FYODOR BORISOV/

TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES

The cockpit on

the Tu-144.

ARTYOM ANIKEEV/

TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES

BOTTOM • Tu-144

CCCP-77115 is now

stored at Zhukovsky.

FYODOR BORISOV/

TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES

Aeroflot’s First Class

cabin on the Tu-144

was laid out in a 2-1

configuration.

VALENTIN GREBNEV/

TRANSPORT-PHOTO IMAGES