Tupolev Tu-144
Soviet supersonic airliner
The Tupolev Tu-144 (Russian: Tyполев Ту-144; NATO reporting name: Charger) is a Soviet supersonic passenger airliner designed by Tupolev that operated commercially from 1975 to 1983, including 1977–1978 passenger service.
The Tu-144 was the world's first commercial supersonic transport aircraft with its prototype's maiden flight from Zhukovsky Airport on 31 December 1968, two months before the British-French Concorde. The Tu-144 was a product of the Tupolev Design Bureau, an OKB headed by aeronautics pioneer Aleksey Tupolev, and 16 aircraft were manufactured by the Voronezh Aircraft Production Association in Voronezh. The Tu-144 conducted 102 commercial flights, of which only 55 carried passengers, at an average service altitude of 16,000 metres (52,000 ft) and cruised at a speed of around 2,200 kilometres per hour (1,400 mph) (Mach 2). The Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969, four months before Concorde, and on 26 May 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2.
Reliability and developmental issues restricted the viability of the Tu-144 for regular use; these factors, together with repercussions of the 1973 Paris Air Show Tu-144 crash, projections of high operating costs, and rising fuel prices and environmental concerns outside the Soviet Union, caused foreign customer interest to wane. The Tu-144 was introduced into commercial service with Aeroflot between Moscow and Alma-Ata on 26 December 1975 and starting 1 November 1977 passenger flights began; it was withdrawn less than seven months later after a new Tu-144 variant crash-landed during a test flight on 23 May 1978. The Tu-144 remained in commercial service as a cargo aircraft until the cancellation of the Tu-144 programme in 1983. The Tu-144 was later used by the Soviet space programme to train pilots of the Buran spacecraft, and by NASA for a supersonic research programme from June 1996 to April 1999. The Tu-144 made its final flight on 26 June 1999 and surviving aircraft were put on display in Russia, the former Soviet Union and Germany, or into storage.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q188513. The Library of Congress control number is sh88006469. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1983, 1977 and 1978.
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