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 ...

The Tu-144 first flew in 1968, two months before the Concorde. Top speed was an impressive Mach 2.15, slightly faster than the Concorde, and it could carry over 40 more passengers.

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.

That is why Tupolev Tu-144 was so important for the reds to finish building first. The soviet plane first went supersonic on 5 June 1969 and on 26 May 1970 became the first commercial transport to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 Soviet aircraft Tupolev Tu-144 takes its maiden flight, on December 12, 1968. The Tu-144 was the first Soviet supersonic transport aircraft, constructed under the direction of the Soviet ...

Alexei Tupolev helped design mass-production passenger jets such as the Tupolev 134, ... But one of his top projects was the creation of the Tu-144, ...