
The Soviet Union’s Flawed Rival to Concorde - fpoling
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171018-the-soviet-unions-flawed-rival-to-concorde
======
scrumper
The article misses (although hints at the cause of) a very important
difference: Concorde's ability to supercruise, that is, cruise supersonically
without using afterburners. The Tu-144 needed to use afterburners during the
entire supersonic phase of flight, whereas Concorde just needed them to
accelerate. Concorde was a notorious fuel guzzler but only during subsonic
flight and ground operation; she was actually quite efficient at Mach 2.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Indeed.

Concorde's largest downfall wasn't technical, it was social. The original
expectation was that she would rapidly climb, go supersonic over land, and
supercruise all the way to her destination. If this was possible it was
reasonably economical.

Problem is that sonic-booms over populated areas are a big "no no." So
Concorde was forced to wait until she got out over the atlantic to
supercruise, which meant more time spent in her inefficient subsonic
configuration and longer flight times.

In 1976 the US actually banned Concorde due to noise complaints. The ban was
lifted in 1977 after changes mentioned above.

~~~
KGIII
The Concorde was also really expensive. I was able to fly on it twice, once
each direction, near the end of their operations. I only flew on it because
they'd announced they were shutting down and I wanted to fly supersonic before
they went out of business. It was very expensive.

I think it was in '03 and the price was just something like $12,000 for the
two flights. It was high enough that I put it on a credit card. The prices had
a lot of variation and I flew first class but they had a higher class that
they called Concorde, as I recall.

~~~
martinald
Yes, it was a premium product. But if you're a banker/lawyer going between NY
and London a lot and your billable rate is $crazy, it's super good value.

I think there is an enormous market for something like Concorde now, much more
than there was before. The amount of super rich has increased massively (and
each of them have way more money). I think you'd even see executives using it
over their own private jets for the speed increase - which means tickets could
be crazy expensive, as operating a jet is very pricey.

I suppose it'd depend a bit on if you could get WiFi on it though. Wonder if
that is possible at supersonic speeds?

~~~
mandevil
R.E.G. Davies worked out why this isn't as powerful as you think because the
earth is round. The justification for that expensive ticket is that you can
have your meeting without getting jet-lagged. So, basically, leave your house
at a reasonable time, get to a meeting on the other side of the Atlantic at a
reasonable time- that's worth an awful lot of money. If you have to fly out
the night before anyway, what justifies the extra money versus subsonic
transport?

So let's imagine you live in New York and have a meeting in Paris- and let's
say, for the purpose of argument, that it's actually a transporter,
instantaneous travel from airport to airport. You leave your house at 6AM, get
to the airport at 7AM. Its an international flight, so you need to get to the
airport early, so your flight leaves at 8AM. You instantaneously arrive in
Paris, but that's six hours time zone different: 2PM in Paris. Two hours to
navigate through customs and the airport and it's 4PM, an hour to do ground
transport to your meeting and it's already 5PM.

So even with exactly zero travel time between JFK->CDG your meeting can't be
conducted at normal business times. So if your meeting still requires
traveling out the day before and dealing with jet lag and all the rest, there
just isn't that much benefit to justify the costs.

It might make sense for a business jet, so long as the costs are really not
much more than a GV, or if it's primarily about prestige anyway.

~~~
wahern
Two hours for customs? If you join the Global Entry Program it only takes a
few minutes--you check-in at a kiosk and go to a special lane. Great if you
have kids. You also end up enrolled in the Trusted Traveler Program, which
puts you in the expedited lane for terminal security.

As for the wait time at the airport: if you're buying premium tickets the
airline doesn't care how late you arrive as long as you don't delay the
flight. IIRC, at least for domestic travel TSA requires that all checked
luggage be presented at least 30 minutes prior to departure, so that's the
only hard time limit. Maybe it's earlier for international travel, but for a
single day itinerary you presumably wouldn't have any checked luggage.

~~~
mandevil
So far as I know, France has no equivalent of Global Entry. It's also not
universal advice, even if you were flying into the US- it's only available to
citizens of certain countries. (France is not one of them, though Germany's
EasyPass is.)

It would be faster to get through the CDG customs lines if you had a Schengen
citizenship, since they could get into the the Schengen lines, but that's not
really particularly useful advice.

------
endijs
This 6min video does a great job on explaining the differences between
Concorde and Tu-144 and why Tu-144 was so bad at many things.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFWbuKr5-I8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFWbuKr5-I8)

~~~
phit_
Odd coincidence how this "news" article popped out of nowhere, after this
video just had brought the Tu-144 into the focus again.

------
0xfeba
That article had quite a few typos, especially for a BBC article:

> “There was the space race and the race to put a man on the Moon race
> happening at the same time.

> The Nasa flights spelled the end of the Tu-144’s flying career. Despite the
> refinements added by _Nasan_

> The Nasa programme _bought_ the Tu-144 back from the dead

~~~
smitherfield
The last one might be a pun.

------
thriftwy
I think they hoped to get it out of the door to try things on and then replace
with gen-2 supersonics which were no doubt to arrive.

As you know they never materialized due to lack of reasonable economic demand.

I think the sadder story are Soviet high-speed trains. There were one or two,
they did some speed records, worked on some experimental routes and never got
wide adoption.

Only in the last 15 years there's finally some viable high-speed options.
Including one of Soviet designs incidentally.

~~~
lmm
Seems like there's a commonality with Britain there. We had a world-leading
high-speed train design (the APT), rushed into a press demonstration 6 months
before it was ready; the project was cancelled but the technology found its
way to Italy and then, more recently, back into trains that are now used on
the route for which the design was originally intended.

~~~
cr1895
>the technology found its way to Italy

Is this also related to the problematic and eventually scrapped Dutch high-
speed Fyra trains?

~~~
lmm
They have a common heritage. The APT design was developed into the FS ETR 400
which was a collaboration between Fiat Ferroviaria (who have gone on to
produce the Pendolino, the train I was talking about, and are now part of
Alstom) and Ansaldo (who, as AnsaldoBreda, produced Fyra; now part of
Hitachi).

~~~
gsnedders
Note the ETR 450 uses hydraulic actuators, as do the later Pendolino models,
whereas the APT used electromagnetic actuators. (I'm unaware of any ETR 400
having ever existed; the prototype ETR 401 did, but that used passive tilt
rather than the active tilt developed by BREL.)

SIG, then owned by Fiat Ferroviaria, built the electromagnetic actuators used
by the Swiss ICN and the British Class 390 "Pendolino".

------
NamTaf
If you're ever around Stuttgart/Frankfurt area, there's a couple of really
amazing Technical Museums that are sister facilities. One is in Sinsheim and
one is in Speyer and are known as the Teknik Museum Sinsheim/Speyer. They're
full of really awesome exhibits - heaps and heaps of cars, trains, aircraft,
military equipment, etc. Due to it being a late plan, I spent a very rushed 4
hours in each of them and that wasn't nearly enough time - at times I was
literally jogging between the exhibits trying to absorb it all. They are
really amazing places to check out.

Anyway, specifically of interest here is Teknik Museum Sinsheim [1], which has
both a Concorde and a Tu-144 on one of the hall roofs, next to each other. You
get to climb up and walk through them, look up from under them, etc. but it's
really cool to just look at all the little differences between them. Here's
[2] a cool website I just found that shows a side by side comparison of the
two jets.

The one that caught my eye immediately, which you can see on that page as well
as this [3] wiki image, was that the air intake on the Tu-144 is _far_ longer,
necessitating the rear bogies to fold up into the air intake. I can't begin to
imagine how they handled that without seriously messing with the air flow (and
I can't find any diagrams of the airflow like with the Concorde). Wiki
apparently says it was due to design misconceptions on the Soviet side and
they were eventually shortened significantly. Also, the engines sit far more
inboard on the Tu than the Concorde, presumably so they can get that
additional length of intake up the fuselage/wing structure. Alternatively, it
wouldn't surprise me if that's also part of its military heritage coming
through.

The Tu-144 is a pretty fascinating aircraft, even beyond the story behind its
development and competition with the Concorde. However, it's really cool to
compare the pair and see the differences because it makes you wonder why they
differ in those ways - whether it's a case of the Soviets thinking they should
replace/modify the Western design with something better, or whether they took
multiple concepts including the Western design and sort of mashed them
together. It's truly a fascinating aircraft, despite its failures.

[1]: [https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en/](https://sinsheim.technik-
museum.de/en/)

[2]:
[http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/concorde_vs_tu-144.htm](http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/concorde_vs_tu-144.htm)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#/media/File:Tup...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#/media/File:Tupolev_Tu-144_CCCP-77102_LEB_02.06.73_edited-3.jpg)

~~~
gmueckl
The sister museum in Speyer (not far away) has a Buran, a Soyuz capsule, and a
nicely prepared Boeing 747 among other thing. If you are going to visit, you
should try to visit both.

~~~
tannhaeuser
The _Europa Park_ theme park a little bit further south, while not a museum,
has a rebuild _Mir_ used for cosmonaut training.

[1]: [http://www.ep-fans.info/?id=1540,12,11](http://www.ep-
fans.info/?id=1540,12,11)

------
jankotek
> _The space race undermined the Tu-144 programme by shifting the Soviet focus
> towards long-range rocketry and high-altitude missiles, and away from
> supersonic bombers, effectively forcing the Soviets to develop the Tu-144 as
> a standalone civil aircraft programme._

This is the key to understand this plane. Soviet goverment considered bombers
to be obsolete by rockets. Designers had to pull many tricks to keep
supersonic bomber program running.

One way was to develop civil/cargo plane. Other was to call it 'rocket
carrier' (long range missile launcher).

------
PhantomGremlin
I'm surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Boeing's SST effort. It was a much
more ambitious aircraft, larger and faster. Prototypes were under
construction. There were orders for 122 planes.

Development was expensive, and Boeing was relying on considerable
contributions from the US government. The project was cancelled in 1971 amid
cost and environmental concerns.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707)

------
flatfilefan
I was surprised to find no mention of Tu-160, which is a supersonic strategic
bomber currently in operation. It builds on Tu-144 design.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-160](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-160)
One of the advantages of flying Mach-2 is to provoke the increased wear of the
intercept aircraft at peaceful times, or so they say.

------
oblio
Maybe someone with domain knowledge is around here: could we make a spacious
long range super sonic airplane today, with our modern tech? Think something a
bit smaller than the 747, for example.

Why isn't it considered viable? The world is 2x richer than the last time the
Concorde flew...

~~~
Fomite
[https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-
fast...](https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/youre-too-cheap-to-fly-
faster-7885a299bca2)

The major pressure has been to make aviation cheaper, not faster.

~~~
ghaff
Right. And for those already willing/able to forgo the cheaper for more
comfort (but not much speed), there are already well-established options
including lay-flat seating for international routes and even private plane
rental.

~~~
Fomite
Honestly, I can't say myself that if I had the money, that I'd choose getting
there a few hours earlier instead of feeling like a human being when I
arrived.

------
loeg
Less long form information about the vehicle:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#Paris_Air_Show_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#Paris_Air_Show_crash)

------
Koshkin
> _Its first flight comes three months before Concorde takes to the air._

So, a copy was rushed into testing before the original was ready. This could
explain why there were flaws in the design...

------
BackToSchool
It was a direct ripoff of concord only it was a POS that crashed on. It’s air
show debut. It never flew commercially more than a half dozen times.

------
aaron695
I'm confused.

The standard reason given it failed was the plans were leaked on purpose to
the Soviets that had flaws to try (successfully) to make it crash.

I'm happy it's an urban legend, but it was up there with the NN Tank story and
the Gas Pipeline story (yet to be disappointed that this too is legend) as a
common pre-WWW engineering story.

Why no mention? Even to nix the legend or for old times sake.

