Crash of the TU-144
June 3rd, 1973; The second production Tupolev Tu-144 broke apart in mid-air in front of the audience at the Paris Air Show, killing all six crew as well as eight people on the ground. Considering the TU-144 was facing off publicly in their rivalry with the Anglo-French Concorde, the pilots may have attempted a maneuver that was beyond the capabilities of the aircraft. The Soviet TU-144 pilot, Mikhail Kozlov, had bragged that he would outperform the Concorde. "Just wait until you see us fly," he was quoted as saying. "Then you'll see something." On the final day of the show, the Concorde, which was not yet in production, performed its demonstration flight first. Kozlov was determined to show how much better his aircraft was.
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During its demonstration, the TU-144 was approaching show center in dirty configuration, gear out and the "moustache" canards extended, then Kozlov selected full afterburners, pulling the behemoth into a sharp climb with all four engines screaming. As the 144 approached 2,000 ft, it pitched over and dropped into a steep dive. During the attempted recovery, the left wing came away first, followed by the complete disintegration, before the remaining pieces impacted the surface.
Bob Hoover was a witness to the accident, and believed that the rivalry of the Tu-144 and Concorde led the pilot of the Tu-144 to attempt a maneuver that went beyond the abilities of the aircraft: "That day, the Concorde went first, and after the pilot performed a high-speed flyby, he pulled up steeply and climbed to approximately 10,000 before levelling off. When the Tu-144 pilot performed the same maneuver, he pulled the nose up so steeply l didn't believe he could possibly recover."Another theory circulating from this incident was that a French Mirage fighter that had been shadowing the TU-144 had come too close to the Russian SST, causing the crew of the TU-144 to perform evasive action to avoid an air-to-air collision with the fighter jet.
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