3 ms·

I think anybody would be hard-pressed to argue that the Tu-144 saw meaningful commercial passenger service. Neither has Boom yet, to be fair, but it at least is

• rob74 6y ago
  True, but it was a supersonic airliner, 16 pieces were built and it did have 55 passenger-carrying flights (according to Wikipedia), so if you make a list without further qualifiers as in the article ("second ever"), it's a bit strange to gloss over it completely...
  • dwd 6y ago
    It also flew before the Concorde, but we can't have inconvenient facts like that in the middle of a cold war. From my childhood I was under the impression that it was a rip-off copy like the Buran.
    • masklinn 6y ago
      > From my childhood I was under the impression that it was a rip-off copy like the Buran. That's never been proven-proven, but there still are lots of suspicions: it looked strangely like earlier concorde design, at least one person (Sergei Pavlov) was caught smuggling concorde design documents, and there are many declassified reports (e.g. from the CIA) of a large industrial espionage ring targeting Concorde in both France and the UK. Also regardless of the previous, the TU-144 had flagrantly been rushed to arrive before Concorde, the inside design was complete garbage, it needed braking parachutes to stop, and it was very unstable at low-speed. This necessitated serious improvements and refinements which led to its first passenger flight taking place almost 2 years after Concorde's (November 1977 versus January 1976).