Soviet Supersonic Passenger Plane

[Мастер]

Click on "1971" to see the Soviet supersonic aeroplane.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/17/busin ... ?hpt=hp_c5

It bears some resemblance to some other supersonic aeroplanes you might be familiar with.

[tubeswell]

Yes the soviets copied a lot of good designs badly

[Heid the Ba]

Click on 1973 to see why they stopped making them.

As a child of the 1960s one of my happiest memories was finally getting to fly on Concorde, sometime about 2003. I have a photo of me grinning like an idiot next to the Mach 2 indicator.

[Мастер]

The Soviet plane actually flew a little before Concorde. There certainly were accusations of industrial espionage; it is less than clear how true those accusations are, and how effective any espionage that might have taken place was. There are rumours that the French firm involved in Concorde design was aware of Soviet espionage, and fed them faulty design information.

The TU-144 had stability problems, and crashed, twice, on a very limited number of flights.

[Heid the Ba]

There is definitely some cross over in design, but both have elements of earlier supersonic bombers. The TU 144 does seem to have been a particularly shitty plane, perhaps United should have flown them?

[Enzo]

I am not sure United would have accepted them. As I understand it, UNited requires a baggage dump at altitude feature, and the Soviets were not able to perfect that.