Russian documentary with English commentary about the 1960's Soviet supersonic jet plane, the Aeroflot Tupolev TU-144. The film shows design and construction of the TU-144 as well as early flight tests including takeoff and landing sequences.

The TU-144 was quite similar in design to the Concorde, with much speculation the plane was in fact built using plans stolen from the French. The first crash of a TU-144 occurred at a Paris airshow in the 70's, a number of later failures (some resulting in aircraft loss) meant the planes were then taken from passenger duties and used for high speed mail transfer before the fleet was eventually taken out of service for various reasons (costs, reliability, safety) although they were still used for cosmonaut training missions during the 1980's. In the 1990's NASA used a TU-144 for high speed research and data gathering.



This film made available courtesy the US National Archives, ARC identifyer 653130 / LI 263.2392