#concordski

Concordski

In the 60′s, the British Intelligence found that the Soviets were indeed conducting widespread industrial espionage, from bribing the employees of Western companies for blueprints and technical manuals, to acquiring products that it was illegal for Western companies to sell to them and reverse engineering the designs, to photographing the contents of the briefcases of Westerner businessmen while they traveled internationally, to directing members of the British Communist Party to join the Western development teams and report back to Soviet intelligence.

In the 1960s, the British and French began cooperation on the Concorde, the iconic supersonic transport (SST) aircraft and the Soviets began a "mini Space Race" with them to see who could fly the first SST, which was believed to represent the future of commercial aviation with obvious synergies for military aviation. The Russian plane was the Tupolev Tu-144. The closed decision-making process of the Soviet government in the 1960s is difficult to penetrate even today, but it appears that they demanded that Alexei Tupolev win the race to build and fly the first SST but gave him fewer resources to do so than the Anglo-French effort had despite the fact that Russia had a narrower base of aviation expertise and was starting the game later. To the Soviets, the technical know-how residing in the Concorde program became a great prize, perhaps the greatest potential technological prize that could be won through industrial espionage.

British intelligence became aware of a large, long-term Soviet program of industrial espionage directed toward the Concorde program and decided to respond with a deception / misinformation operation (a la Britain's Operation Mincemeat against the Nazis in WWII) to serve up to the Soviets exactly what they most wanted: the plans for the Concorde. The British intelligence (perhaps jointly with French intelligence) set up a 2nd large design effort for the Concorde in which only the leaders knew that the final designs would contain critical flaws and be worthless.  They then steered the Soviet spies that they had identified toward this false program. As far as the British knew, their counterintelligence operation was a success, the false Concorde designs were stolen by Soviet intelligence, and immediately copied by Soviet designers, as so much British military and aerospace technology had apparently been before.  Tupolev's Tu-144 program advanced quickly in the design stage but in the ground test and wind tunnel stage it ran into many power, control, and integrity problems which delayed its first flight by two years.  And lo and behold, when early images of the Tu-144 prototype began to leak out, they looked just like the Concorde:

The Tu-144 may have run into problems and delays, but the Concorde program also ran into major problems, cost overruns, and delays, ultimately causing an international incident when the British demanded that the Concorde program be cancelled and the French refused (and the language of their agreements gave advantages to the party that wanted to continue the program in the event of such a dispute). 

So the Concorde program, and the "mini Space Race" between the Anglo-French program and Tupolev, continued.Eventually, Tupolev won this "mini Space Race" to fly the first SST and the prototype Tu-144  first flew in 1968 near Moscow, beating the Concorde by two months and scoring a major propaganda victory for the Soviets.Westerners were impressed by the technological feat but also began remarking that the Tu-144 looked exactly like the Concorde, which had been started earlier and whose public appearance was not a secret. 

The Tu-144 named the "Charger" by NATO but was dubbed the "Concordski" in the Western press. The Tu-144 went into production in 1969 while still wrestling with unsolved problems of power, control, and integrity that could be attributed to the great difficulty of the engineering problems that the designers faced or that could be attributed to the Soviets never having done the R&D necessary to build an SST from first principles and having only worked from stolen, flawed designs.

You can see how poorly aerodynamic its design is in comparison to the Concorde:

Tupolev:

Concorde:

The Soviets took a Tu-144 to the Paris Air Show in 1973. Suddenly the plane dove downward and then tried to climb back upward but it broke apart in flight and crashed, killing all 6 people on board and 8 more on the ground. The intent of British Intelligence was likely to confound, slow down, and maybe even cause the cancellation of the Tu-144 program, not to cause a spectacular fatal crash at an air show. In addition, years later when all bugs could have been worked out of the model, the Tu-144 model was still considered to be a very unreliable airplane with numerous serious flight incidents on its record.

VIDEO: Concordski: How the Soviet Union lost the supersonic race

VIDEO: Concordski: How the Soviet Union lost the supersonic race The Soviet Union’s hopes of winning the race to launch the first supersonic airliner was dealt a devastating blow in 1973 when their plane crashed at the Paris Air Show.

Transportation | Flight with Concordski, Tupolev Tu 144

LG G4 Rated as the Best Camera Phone for Pictures @ Searchy.One Search Description From Photographer if Any: The TU 144 was competition for the Concorde, but after an accident the Russians stopped the project. Only a few of these mighty machines where built. By jazzz1 Source: 500px.com

At least, that's what it looks like

Decaying and surrounded by tress in a leafy nowhere it does appear to be an ill advised domestic purchase. Or maybe something won in a bet down the pub then dumped in the backyard with no idea what to do with it.

Abandoned Supersonic TU-144 in a Russian backyard. pic.twitter.com/YP88qYyJD5

— Gautam Trivedi (@Gotham3) September 8, 2014

In fact the "backyard" in question is the grounds of the Institute of Aviation in Kazan

So not as ridiculous as the photograph makes it appear at all! The supersonic jet (nicknamed Concordski in the West) is in a terrible state of repair though. This particular model was only ever used as a test prototype and last flew in March 1976