The period of the 1950s and 1960s was probably one of the greatest strides in aircraft design and development seen. It was the period from breaking the sound barrier to speeds of over Mach 6, if you can call the X-15 an aircraft. Military planes were developed that routinely flew above Mach and many were designed for Mach 2.

In the civil market, such changes were occurring as well. Airliners switched from reciprocating engines to turbojets, turboprops and finally turbofans. Basically, that is where the airlines have stayed. All of these have been subsonic with two brilliant exceptions. One is the Anglo-French Concorde, a supersonic transport (SST) that provided 30 years of travel until its lone fatal accident rushed its removal from service. The other was the Tu-144, a Soviet development that was in regular service only one year, before it was removed, as much as to high operating costs as anything else.

When the Soviet government got wind of the development of the Concorde, it was determined to build one that was better and faster. These were the days of massive state-funded projects and so cost was not a consideration as much as national prestige. This was an area where the Russian designers were in new water. All aspects of the aircraft had to be carefully designed and testes. It is no coincidence that the resulting Tu-144 looked so much like the Concorde as the design teams reached basically the same conclusions during the design phase.

Though flown first in December of 1968 and faster than the Concorde, the Tu-144 suffered a fatal airshow crash in 1973 and only operated on scheduled flights for a year during 1977/78 before the aircraft was pulled from service. One remaining airframe was refurbished in the 1990s, flying in 1996 as part of a joint French-Russian program. The single Tu-144LL was finally grounded in 1998 with no further work being done on SST development.

Author Yefim Gordon and his co-author in this work, Vladimir Rigmant, takes us through the complete development of the Tu-144 and the later Tu-144LL. As with all of the Red Star series, this one has complete specs on the aircraft as well as a superb collection of both color and black & white photos. Possible military developments of the aircraft are included with a fine set of drawings.

Overall, this is a great book on a most interesting aircraft and one that will appeal to both the airliner fan and to the Russian military enthusiast alike. A great read and one that I can highly recommend.

January 2006

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