Tupolev Tu-144 - Cessation of Tu-144D Production

Cessation of Tu-144D Production

The decision to cease Tu-144D production was issued on 7 January 1982, followed by a USSR government decree dated 1 July 1983 to cease the whole Tu-144 programme and to use produced Tu-144 aircraft as flying laboratories. A formal decision to cease the Tu-144 programme was in all likelihood related, to an extent, to the generational change in the Soviet leadership and departure of those officials who had strong individual commitment to the Tu-144 and stakes in the project, and corresponding change in the bureaucratic balance. The Tu-144 fared worse after the death of Minister Petr Dementiev on 14 May 1977, but the last bureaucratic straw must have been Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982.

In retrospect it is apparent that the Tu-144 suffered from a rush in the design process to the detriment of thoroughness and quality, and this rush to get airborne exacted a heavy penalty later. The rush is apparent even in outward timing: the 1963 government decree launching the Tu-144 programme defined that the Tu-144 should fly in 1968, so it did indeed fly on the last days of 1968 to fulfill government goals set five years earlier. (By the way of comparison, Concorde's first flight was originally scheduled for February 1968, but was pushed back several times until March 1969 in order to iron out problems and test components better). Unlike Concorde development, the Tu-144 project was also strongly driven by ideologically and politically motivated haste of Soviet self-imposed racing against Concorde; Aleksei Poukhov, one of Tupolev's designers, reminiscences: "For the Soviet Union to allow the West to get ahead and leave it behind at that time was quite unthinkable. We not only had to prevent the West from getting ahead, but had to compete and leapfrog them, if necessary. This was the task Khruschev set us... We knew that when Concorde's maiden flight had been set for February or March, 1969, we would have to get our plane up and flying by the end of 1968."

The introduction of the Tu-144 into passenger service was timed to the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution, as was duly noted in Soviet officials' speeches delivered at the airport before the inaugural flight – whether the aircraft was actually ready for passenger service was deemed of secondary importance. Even the outward details of the inaugural Tu-144 flight betrayed the haste of its introduction into service: several ceiling panels were ajar, service trays stuck, window shades dropped without being pulled, reading lights did not work, not all toilets worked and a broken ramp delayed departure half an hour. On arrival to Alma-Ata, the Tu-144 was towed back and forth for 25 minutes before it could be aligned with the exit ramp. Equally telling is the number of hours spent on flight testing. Whereas Concorde had been subjected to 5,000 hours of testing by the time it was certified for passenger flight, making it the most tested aircraft ever, total flight testing time of the Tu-144 by the time of its introduction into passenger service was less than 800 hours. Flight testing time logged on the prototype (68001) was 180 hours flight testing time for the Tu-144S till the completion of state acceptance tests was 408 hours; service tests till the commencement of passenger service were 96 hours of flight time; altogether totalling 756 hours. It is unclear why the Minister of Aviation Industry and the Minister of Civil Aviation did not endorse the protocols of state acceptance tests for four months after the tests completion. One reason could be the change of the guard – Minister Dementiev, who was one of the chief backers of Tu-144, died a day before the tests completed (something Gordon fails to notice) – but it might also have had something to do with aircraft reliability record uncovered during the tests that was no better than the subsequent dismal service record.