The Russian Federation wants to launch a supersonic passenger plane again. A corresponding technology demonstrator is to be produced as early as next year. This should be based on the MiG-29 fighter jet.

The production of the demonstrator will be carried out by the Chaplygin Siberian Scientific Research Institute of Aviation, Institute Director Vladimir Barsuk announced at a press conference. Based on the test vehicle, a new supersonic passenger aircraft is to be made ready for series production. This is to be completely redeveloped.

Barsuk: “A new fuselage will be used, a new wing, a wing with a reduced supersonic shock wave. Modern research allows us to design the aircraft in such a way that the shock wave is significantly reduced. SibNIA will conduct flight tests”. It is currently assumed that the development and research work on the demonstrator alone will take around two years.

In Russia there is another supersonic project, because a corresponding business jet is to be developed under the leadership of the Rostec Group. There is currently no reliable information about the extent to which there is a connection between the two projects or whether they are identical. It is therefore necessary to await further developments.

Tu-144: Infamous Soviet history

By the way, this is not the first “excursion” of the Russian aviation industry into supersonic passenger aviation. In the 1960s, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and other countries competed for particularly fast commercial aircraft. The oil crisis at the time, among other things, led to the United States withdrawing entirely. What remains are the Concorde, which was developed and built jointly by France and the UK, and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144.

The latter pattern had an extremely inglorious history. Although the machine was superior to the Concorde in terms of technology and theoretical performance, the Tu-144 proved to be massively unreliable. Numerous of these supersonic jets have crashed, resulting in very few passenger flights. Curious: for a while the Tu-144 could only be used for mail flights within the USSR. Thus mailbags were transported domestically at supersonic speeds.

Since the Tu-144 has suffered many accidents with fatal consequences in its comparatively short operational history, only the most well-known accident is mentioned here. A plane crashed during the Paris Air Show on June 3, 1973. The Soviet Union and France argued about the cause, but it is most likely that the Tu-144 that crashed was simply not suitable for the show flight maneuvers carried out and that the model was loaded far beyond the permissible limits, which ultimately led to the crash led.

In 1995 and 1996, the former SSSR-77114 was reconditioned and used as a flying laboratory for the development of future supersonic aircraft. The US NASA and Tupolev have the project cost around 350 million US dollars. After the conversion, the machine was given the designation Tu-144LL and was the only one transferred to the Russian register, since the Soviet Union no longer existed. Numerous test flights were carried out up until 1999. Since then, this specimen has been put away along with a few others that have survived.

Interested parties can view both a Concorde and a Tu-144 in Germany in the Technikmuseum Sinsheim. It is definitely advisable to take a close look at the two patterns one after the other from the outside and inside, as you can easily notice similarities, but also blatant differences.