Tupolev Tu-144

The Tupolev Tu-144 (Russian: Tyполев Ту-144; NATO reporting name: Charger) is a retired jet airliner and commercial supersonic transport aircraft (SST). It was the world's first commercial SST (with its maiden flight occurring on December 31st, 1968), the second being the Anglo-French Concorde which first flew on March 2nd, 1969. The design was a product of the Tupolev design bureau, headed by Alexei Tupolev, of the Soviet Union and manufactured by the Voronezh Aircraft Production Association in Voronezh, Russia. It conducted 102 commercial flights, of which only fifty-five carried passengers, at an average service altitude of 52,000 feet (15,850 meters) and cruised at a speed of around 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h or Mach 1.6).

The prototype's first flight was made on December 31st 1968, near Moscow from Zhukovsky Airport, two months before the first flight of Concorde. The Tu-144 first went supersonic on June 5th 1969 (Concorde first went supersonic on October 1st 1969), and on May 26th 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2. A Tu-144 crashed in 1973 at the Paris Air Show, delaying its further development. The aircraft was introduced into commercial service on December 26th 1975. In May 1978, another Tu-144 (an improved version, the Tu-144D) crashed on a test flight while being delivered. The aircraft remained in use as a cargo aircraft until 1983, when the Tu-144 commercial fleet was grounded. The Tu-144 was later used by the Soviet space program to train pilots of the Buran spacecraft, and by NASA for supersonic research until 1999, when the Tu-144 made its last flight on June 26th 1999.