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A Russian film, dubbed in English, about the development of the Tupolev Tu-144 SST. The film was placed in the US National Archives by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization.
Split with MKVmerge GUI (part of MKVToolNix), the same software can recombine the downloaded parts (in mp4 format): http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge-gui.html
part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrTmjy5GLis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144
The Tupolev Tu-144 (NATO name: "Charger'") was a Soviet supersonic transport aircraft (SST) and remains one of only two SSTs to enter commercial service, the other being the Concorde. The design, publicly unveiled in January 1962, was constructed under the direction of the Soviet Tupolev design bureau, headed by Alexei Tupolev.
The prototype first flew on 31 December 1968 near Moscow, two months before the first flight of the Concorde. The Tu-144 first broke the sound barrier on 5 June 1969, and on 15 July 1969 became the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2.
The Tu-144 was outwardly similar to the Concorde, under development at the same time by Aérospatiale/British Aircraft Corporation, and allegations were frequently made that Soviet espionage services had stolen Concorde technology.
The Tu-144 suffered a crash in 1973 at the Paris Air Show, delaying its development. The aircraft was introduced into passenger service on 1 November 1977, almost two years after the Concorde. In May 1978, another Tu-144 (an improved version, named Tu-144D) crashed in a test flight while being delivered, and the passenger fleet was permanently grounded after only 55 scheduled flights. The aircraft remained in use as a cargo plane until 1983, by which point a total of 102 commercial flights had been completed. The Tu-144 was later used by the Soviet space programme to train pilots of the Buran spacecraft, and by NASA for supersonic research...
The Soviet government published the concept of the Tu-144 in an article in the January 1962 issue of the magazine Technology of the Air Transport. The air ministry started development of the Tu-144 on 26 July 1963, 10 days after the design was approved by the Council of Ministers. The plan called for five flying prototypes to be built in four years, with the first aircraft to be ready in 1966.
Despite the close similarity in appearance of the Tu-144 to the Anglo-French supersonic aircraft, there were significant differences in the control, navigation and engine systems. In areas such as range, braking and engine control, the Tu-144 lagged behind the Concorde, but aerodynamics of the soviet aircraft was better. While the Concorde utilized an electronic engine control package from Lucas, Tupolev was not permitted to purchase it for the Tu-144 as it could also be used on military aircraft. The Concorde's designers used the fuel of the airliner as the coolant for air conditioning the cabin and the hydraulic system (see Concorde for details). Tupolev installed additional equipment on the Tu-144 to accomplish this, increasing the weight of the airliner.
Alexei A. Tupolev continued to work to improve the Tu-144 with upgrades and changes were made on the Tu-144 prototype. While both the Concorde and the Tu-144 prototype had ogival delta wings, the Tu-144's wing lacked Concorde's conical camber. Production Tu-144s replaced this wing with a double-delta wing including conical camber, and they added a simple but practical device: two small retractable canard surfaces, one on either side of the forward section on the aircraft, to increase lift at low speeds...
At the Paris Air Show on 3 June 1973, the development program of the Tu-144 suffered severely when the first Tu-144S production airliner (reg 77102) crashed.
While in the air, the Tu-144 underwent a violent downwards manoeuvre. Trying to pull out of the subsequent dive, the Tu-144 broke apart and crashed, destroying 15 houses and killing all six people on board the Tu-144 and eight more on the ground...
A total of 16 airworthy Tu-144s were built: the prototype Tu-144 reg №68001, a pre-production Tu-144S №77101, nine production Tu-144S №77102 -- 77110, and five Tu-144D №77111 -- 77115. The last production aircraft, Tu-144D №77116, was not completed and was left derelict for many years on Voronezh East airfield. There was at least one ground test airframe for static testing in parallel with the prototype №68001 development.
Although its last commercial passenger flight was in 1978, production of the Tu-144 did not cease until 1984, when construction of the airframe was stopped and left partially complete...
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Tupolev Tu-144 Supersonic Transport First Flight: "Takeoff SST" pt2-2 1969 USSR Englishby webdev17451 views
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