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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

• 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).