The Soviet Union though, and Tupolev do deserve a bit of credit for the Tu-144. They beat their rivals to the sky and built an aircraft that could carry more passengers than the Concorde.

When the first Tupolev Tu-144 thundered its way into aeronautical history 50 years ago, lifting off from Zhukovksy airfield on the last day of 1968, much of the supersonic programme remained ...

The TU-144 also proved incredibly unreliable in commercial flight. In just 180 hours of flight time, the first 16 TU-144’s suffered more than 226 failures, nearly a third of them in the air.

Mr. Tupolev redesigned the Tu-144 in the mid-1970s to provide the military with a long-range supersonic nuclear bomber. The swing-wing Tu-160, Blackjack by NATO classification, is still part of ...

It’s a Tupolev Tu-144, known as the “Soviet Concorde,” which debuted in 1968 from the airfield here in Zhukovsky, and was withdrawn from passenger service in 1978.

It was the Tupolev Tu-144, it was Soviet, and it was loud as hell. If you're wondering why you've never heard of the Tu-144, or why you never saw it screaming over your house, it's because it didn ...

When the Tupolev Tu-144 successfully took to the air on December 31, 1968, it gave the Soviet Union bragging rights as the first to put a supersonic airliner into flight, beating its Western ...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Tupolev Tu-144 was the Soviet rival to what? Earlier this year, which singer chose a basket containing photos of homing pigeons as his luxury item on Desert ...

But they were less refined. At one point the Tupolev design bureau approached the Concorde team in order to try and negotiate an engine-management computer system for use with their Tu-144.

The Tupolev Tu-144 inevitably dubbed ‘Concordski’ was once the pride of its nation but incredible pictures show one of the 1400mph planes in a semi-dilapidated state.