If you're ever around Stuttgart/Frankfurt area, there's a couple of really amazing Technical Museums that are sister facilities. One is in Sinsheim and one is i

If you're ever around Stuttgart/Frankfurt area, there's a couple of really amazing Technical Museums that are sister facilities. One is in Sinsheim and one is in Speyer and are known as the Teknik Museum Sinsheim/Speyer. They're full of really awesome exhibits - heaps and heaps of cars, trains, aircraft, military equipment, etc. Due to it being a late plan, I spent a very rushed 4 hours in each of them and that wasn't nearly enough time - at times I was literally jogging between the exhibits trying to absorb it all. They are really amazing places to check out. Anyway, specifically of interest here is Teknik Museum Sinsheim [1], which has both a Concorde and a Tu-144 on one of the hall roofs, next to each other. You get to climb up and walk through them, look up from under them, etc. but it's really cool to just look at all the little differences between them. Here's [2] a cool website I just found that shows a side by side comparison of the two jets. The one that caught my eye immediately, which you can see on that page as well as this [3] wiki image, was that the air intake on the Tu-144 is far longer, necessitating the rear bogies to fold up into the air intake. I can't begin to imagine how they handled that without seriously messing with the air flow (and I can't find any diagrams of the airflow like with the Concorde). Wiki apparently says it was due to design misconceptions on the Soviet side and they were eventually shortened significantly. Also, the engines sit far more inboard on the Tu than the Concorde, presumably so they can get that additional length of intake up the fuselage/wing structure. Alternatively, it wouldn't surprise me if that's also part of its military heritage coming through. The Tu-144 is a pretty fascinating aircraft, even beyond the story behind its development and competition with the Concorde. However, it's really cool to compare the pair and see the differences because it makes you wonder why they differ in those ways - whether it's a case of the Soviets thinking they should replace/modify the Western design with something better, or whether they took multiple concepts including the Western design and sort of mashed them together. It's truly a fascinating aircraft, despite its failures. [1]: https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en/ https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en/ [2]: http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/concorde_vs_tu-144.htm http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/concorde_vs_tu-144.htm [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#/media/File:Tupolev_Tu-144_CCCP-77102_LEB_02.06.73_edited-3.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-144#/media/File:Tup...