The Tu-144 is SO fascinating! It looked like Concorde. It flew before Concorde. It even flew faster than Concorde! The story has espionage, cold war theater, and Russians cutting corners to get to market, leading to accidents. In the 1960s, the race to build a supersonic passenger jet was a three-way sprint between the 🇺🇸 Boeing 2707, 🇬🇧🇫🇷 Concorde, and the 🇷🇺 Tu-144 The US government was supporting Boeing in building supersonic planes... everyone was so hyped that Seattle named their NBA team the Seattle SuperSonics. But their design got bogged down by cost overruns and bureaucracy, and the government pulled the plug. Boeing instead decided to build the 747, which changed global travel forever... but they figured it would be short-lived, since SSTs were going to replace traditional passenger planes... but they did it anyway because they figured they would get repurposed for cargo. In the 60s they thought we would all be flying supersonically, but sadly we aren't, until Boom changes things hopefully. After the govt killed the 2707, that left the Concorde project firmly in the lead until the Soviets stole the plans. KGB-backed spies made off with over 90,000 pages of Concorde technical documents. With stolen blueprints, the Soviets wanted to make sure that the Tu-144 was in the air before the Concorde as a victory for Soviet engineering... They ultimately got it in the air 2 months before the Concorde! It looked like the Concorde, so much so that people called it the “Concordski” But they cut a LOT of corners to get there. It was really loud - passengers couldn't talk to each other, they had to pass handwritten notes to each other. The seats were cramped. The bathrooms broke. The engines guzzled fuel so fast (30% more than the Concorde) that it couldn’t even cross the USSR. It only ever flew one route commercially, from Moscow to Almaty. Another thing that made it challenging: Communism!! The Moscow-Almaty flight was priced at 37 rubles, about $55. The New York - London Concorde flight was priced at $6-12,000! The Tu-144 was a propaganda project, it was never going to make money. Then came the 1973 Paris Air Show crash. The Tu-144 broke apart mid-air in front of thousands of people they were showing off to... Six crew and eight people on the ground died. Out of 102 flights, there were 226 mechanical issues, including 80 serious ones. It crashed again in 1978. Again in 1981. The Concorde had its challenges too - it never came close to recovering its development costs... they were supposed to sell hundreds but only 14 ended up in service... BA and Air France got them basically for free and BA flew it profitably, but both still ultimately canned the programs (after 27 years). Even still I am pretty impressed that the Soviets built a working SST at all... with fewer resources, spy docs, and Cold War pressure breathing down their necks. The Tu-144 was terrible, like many communist products (and for very Soviet/communist reasons), but still impressive!