TUPOLEV Tu-144: JUNE 3, 1973 June 3, 1973: Fourteen people were killed when a USSR crashed at the Paris, France Air Show, thus discouraging worldwide interest in the Tupolev. The Paris Air Show is an annual and quite prestigious event used to demonstrate civilian and military aircraft to potential consumers. As is frequently noted, the close similarity in appearance between the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 and the British-French Concorde, so much so that sometimes the Tupolev is nicknamed the Concordski that there is still debate over whether the similarity is due to both types of aircraft being designed for supersonic (beyond the speed of sound) transport or whether the similarity of the Tupolev to the Concorde was due to Soviet spying -- although there are reportedly significant differences in the control, navigation and engine systems which thus make the Tupolev inferior in comparison to the Concorde. The reason for SSTs (SuperSonic Transports) such as the Tupolev and the Concorde was the idea that the speed of the aircraft as opposed to the quantity of passengers it could carry -- such as the jumbo jets -- would prove to be a more valuable marketing tool. This was later proven to not be so due to wide-bodied jumbo jets that traveled more slowly but which could carry more passengers proving to be more efficient, but the reason why the Soviets would want to preempt the British-French effort was not just for national pride but also for the Soviets to supposedly prove the worth of the Communist economic system they were using at that time. This also figures into one of the theories about why the Tupolev Tu-144 crashed during the June 3, 1973 Paris Air Show as the theory states some never before Tupolev-tried impromptu aggressive maneuvers to outcompete the impressive Concorde performance were authorized the day before (it has also been suggested that the ground engineering team made some changes to the auto-stabilization input controls to allow the Tupolev to outperform the Concorde, but that they also inadvertently connected some factory-test wiring which lead to the aircraft climbing too aggressively), thus leading to the aerodynamic stall from the Tupolev exceeding its design limits so that it broke up and crashed -- which actually seems the most plausible theory to me. Alternative theories are that the spying by the Soviets was uncovered and thus was successfully used to sabotage their effort at producing a viable SST through deliberately passing them flawed information, or that the flight crew aboard the Tupolev was startled into a too-aggressive maneuver to avoid a French chase plane which was engaged in industrial espionage through attempting to photograph the Tupolevs canards (the retractable little wings on the front used to increase lift at slow speeds, from the French canard for duck and so named because they were first likened to the tail of a duck) since those canards were advanced for their time. The sabotage theory seems plausible to me given the similar appearances of the aircraft, although I doubt that most of the flaws in the design would have passed undiscovered up to the point of having the aircraft completed, but avoiding the canard-photographing French chase plane theory seems more implausible because the Tupolev is overall far inferior to the Concorde. Sometimes the poor visibility from the cockpit of a Tupolev is cited as a reason why the flight crew was surprised into making too aggressive a maneuver to avoid the French chase plane despite there being no real risk of collision. Whatever the case, the Tupolev was introduced into service about a year earlier than the Concorde on December 26, 1975 -- a Tupolev also made its first flight about a year earlier than the first Concorde on December 31, 1968, which also figures into the Tupolev Paris Air Show crash if one figures the Soviets were rushing development for precedent and to avoid the implication of having copied the Concorde -- but only saw very limited service of 55 passenger flights and a small number of other flights before being effectively retired. The fact of the matter was that development of the Tupolev was rushed so much due to competition with the superior Concorde that proper tuning and testing of the aircraft was never completed, thus why the Tupolev was such an inferior model. The Tupolev Tu-144S model which crashed at the Paris Air Show, for instance, an incomplete list notes that during 102 flights and 181 hours of freight and passenger time it suffered at least 226 failures, 80 of them in flight and 80 of the failures serious enough to delay or cancel the flight. Aside from fatigue crack problems due to variations in the alloys used for the aircraft, the design of the Tupolev Tu-144 also lead to such a high degree of noise within the cabin from its engines and the cooling system to keep the aircrafts skin from overheating as a result of its supersonic speeds that even passengers sitting next to each other had to scream at or pass notes to communicate with each other, and there was little market for it left within the USSR itself following the small international SST market being successfully captured by the Concorde. The Tupolev also actually began passenger service November 1, 1977 -- almost two years after the Concorde had begun passenger service -- hence also suffice to say that the Tupolev crash at the June 3, 1973 Paris Air Show serves as an analogy for the flaws of a command/planned econony under economic communism/socialism where economic decisions are made at the highest levels and thus how they tend to be too inflexible in readily adjusting to the natural forces of supply by producers and demand by consumers to produce overall quality, thus the reason why the flawed Tupolev was able to be produced in about the same amount of time as better Concorde was produced by the British-French effort. At the same time, one of the problems of allowing a completely laissez-faire economic system under unrestrained capitalism (complete private business ownership) directed purely by supply and demand -- that is to say with no economic oversight by the government to allow as flexible of adjustments to supply and demand as possible -- is that a temptation of capitalists is to cheat profits out of it through false advertising and outright fraud through selling cheap inferior products more like the Tupolev as supposedly expensive superior ones such as the Concorde. (youtube/watch?v=vWV43zaev4g)
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 04:30:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015