Soviet Supersonic: A Tu-one-forty-four Gets a Second Life at Zhukovsky

Video posted by a Russian aviation volunteer shows active exterior restoration work on a Tupolev Tu-144D parked at Zhukovsky airport outside Moscow. The aircraft, which has served as a static display at Russia’s MAKS airshow (Moscow International Aviation and Space Salon), is receiving a cosmetic overhaul - paint, panels, and surface work - in anticipation of the event’s return. It is one of two Tu-144s remaining at Zhukovsky, and this particular example represents the later, more capable D-series variant of the Soviet supersonic program.

The Tu-144: First to Fly, Last to Be Remembered

On December 31, 1968, the Tupolev design bureau flew the Tu-144 from Zhukovsky - making it the first supersonic passenger aircraft to fly, beating the Anglo-French Concorde into the air by two months. The Soviets flew it on New Year’s Eve, and they made sure the world noticed.

The timing was deliberate. The Space Race was at its peak - the Moon landing was still seven months away. The superpowers were competing across every domain of human achievement. Supersonic transport was aviation’s next frontier, with Boeing developing the 2707 for the United States, Concorde under joint British-French development, and Tupolev working around the clock for the Soviet Union.

The Tu-144 crossed that finish line first. But first is not the same as best.

How the Design Evolved

The aircraft that flew in 1968 was substantially different from the one that eventually entered service. The nose was revised, the wing redesigned, and the engines replaced. Most visibly, the production Tu-144 gained retractable canard foreplanes - small winglets just behind the cockpit - to improve low-speed handling. Concorde required no such addition. The Tu-144 did, and it defined the airplane’s distinctive silhouette.

The engine program told its own story. Early production Tu-144s used Kuznetsov NK-144 engines, which required afterburner to maintain supersonic cruise - a significant fuel penalty that hurt the aircraft’s economics and range.

The Tu-144D - the “D” standing for Dorabotanny, meaning refined or upgraded - addressed this directly. It switched to Kolesov RD-36-51 engines, which allowed supersonic cruise without afterburner, similar to Concorde’s Olympus 593s. The D variant was a meaningfully better aircraft, and it is a D variant being restored at Zhukovsky today.

The Paris Air Show Disaster

On June 3, 1973, a Tu-144 broke apart in the air during a demonstration flight at the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget. All six crew members were killed. Additional fatalities occurred on the ground, and 15 houses were destroyed in the village of Goussainville.

The cause has been debated for decades. One prominent theory involves a French Mirage fighter jet performing unauthorized close photography, potentially causing the crew to take abrupt evasive action. Soviet and French accounts have differed. A complete, agreed-upon picture has never emerged. What is certain is that the accident happened in front of the global aviation press, and it cast a shadow over the program from which it never fully recovered.

Brief and Troubled Commercial Service

Aeroflot began operating the Tu-144 on revenue passenger service in late 1977. The reality of that service bears examination: 55 passenger flights over less than a year, primarily on the Moscow to Alma-Ata route (now Almaty, Kazakhstan). In May 1978, a Tu-144D prototype crashed during a test flight near Moscow, killing two of the eight people on board. Aeroflot suspended passenger operations immediately. They never resumed.

A brief period of freight and mail service followed before that too ended. The production line closed. The fleet went into storage - and most of the aircraft stayed there.

NASA and the Tu-144LL: The Cold War Coda Nobody Talks About

In the 1990s, after the Cold War ended and US-Russian cooperation became possible, something remarkable happened. NASA and the Tupolev bureau entered a joint program to fly a modified Tu-144D as a high-speed research platform - the Tu-144LL (Letayushchaya Laboratoriya, or “flying laboratory”).

The aircraft was re-engined with Kuznetsov NK-321 turbofans - the same engines used on the Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber - and used to gather flight data for NASA’s High Speed Civil Transport program, which studied the feasibility of a next-generation supersonic airliner.

Between 1996 and 1998, the Tu-144LL flew 27 research flights. American and Russian engineers and test pilots worked together on an airplane that had spent decades as a Cold War trophy. The program concluded in 1999, but the data it generated continued to feed supersonic research well beyond its final flight.

Why This Matters Now: The Supersonic Revival

The Tu-144’s history is directly relevant to the current generation of supersonic development. Boom Supersonic is building the Overture, targeting transatlantic service by the end of this decade. NASA is flying the X-59 low-boom demonstrator to generate data on quiet supersonic overland flight - long the key regulatory barrier to commercial supersonic routes.

The problems that grounded the Tu-144 and eventually ended Concorde - fuel consumption at supersonic cruise, noise footprint, limited route economics - are precisely the problems today’s developers are engineering around. The Soviet and British-French programs represent actual flight data at scale. That data has value, and studying where those programs hit their limits informs where the hard engineering problems still live.

The Restoration at Zhukovsky

The MAKS airshow has operated on a roughly biennial schedule and has historically been one of the premier aerospace exhibitions in the world. Its schedule has been disrupted in recent years. The expectation within the Russian aviation community is that it will return, and the volunteers working on this Tu-144D intend to have it ready.

The work documented in the video is exterior restoration - the kind of effort that keeps an aircraft looking presentable for public display rather than returning it to airworthiness. The people doing this work appear to be motivated by genuine regard for the airplane as an artifact of engineering history. A delta-winged aluminum aircraft that carried passengers at supersonic speeds, designed and built with 1960s tools and methods, deserves to be preserved and presented well.

Original reporting by The Aviationist.

Key Takeaways

• A Tu-144D at Zhukovsky airport near Moscow is undergoing exterior restoration by Russian volunteers, likely for a future MAKS airshow appearance.
• The Tu-144 flew on December 31, 1968 - the first supersonic passenger aircraft to fly, two months before Concorde.
• A fatal crash at the 1973 Paris Air Show (6 crew killed) and a 1978 test-flight accident near Moscow ended commercial passenger service after just 55 revenue flights.
• In the 1990s, NASA and Tupolev collaborated on the Tu-144LL flying laboratory program, completing 27 research flights between 1996 and 1998.
• The engineering problems that limited the Tu-144 - supersonic cruise efficiency, noise, and route economics - remain the central challenges for today’s supersonic aviation programs including Boom Overture and NASA’s X-59.