Aces High Air Manuals
Volume 34: Civilian Supersonic
Tupolev Tu-144 Charger
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Tupolev Tu-144 Charger Flight Manual Part 2 (Russian)
53 pages
The prototype first flew on 31 December 1968 near Moscow, two months before the first flight of the Concorde. The Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969, and on 26 May 1970 became the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2. A Tu-144 crashed in 1973 at the Paris Air Show, delaying its further development. The aircraft was introduced into passenger service on 1 November 1977, almost two years after Concorde, because of budget restrictions. In May 1978, another Tu-144 (an improved version, named Tu-144D) crashed on a test flight while being delivered, and the passenger fleet was permanently grounded after only 55 scheduled flights. The aircraft remained in use as a cargo aircraft until 1983, by which point a total of 102 commercial flights had been completed. The Tu-144 was later used by the Soviet space program to train pilots of the Buran spacecraft, and by NASA for supersonic research.
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Tupolev Tu-144 Charger Flight Manual Part 3 (Russian)
54 pages
The Tu-144S went into service on 26 December 1975, flying mail and freight between Moscow and Alma-Ata in preparation for passenger services, which commenced on 1 November 1977.
The passenger service ran a semi-scheduled service until the first Tu-144D experienced an in-flight failure during a pre-delivery test flight, crash-landing on 23 May 1978 with two crew fatalities. The Tu-144's 55th and last scheduled passenger flight occurred on 1 June 1978. |
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Tupolev Tu-144 Charger Flight Manual Part 4 (Russian)
42 pages
In the early 1990s, a wealthy businesswoman, Judith DePaul, and her company IBP Aerospace negotiated an agreement with Tupolev, NASA, Rockwell and later Boeing. They offered a Tu-144 as a testbed for its High Speed Commercial Research program, intended to design a second-generation supersonic jetliner called the High Speed Civil Transport. In 1995, Tu-144D No. 77114 (with only 82.5 hours of flight time) was taken out of storage and after extensive modification at a cost of US$350 million, designated the Tu-144LL (where LL is a Russian abbreviation for Flying Laboratory, Russian: Letayuschaya Laboratoriya). The aircraft made a total of 27 flights during 1996 and 1997. Though regarded as a technical success, the project was cancelled for lack of funding in 1999.
In 2003, after the retirement of Concorde, there was renewed interest from several wealthy individuals who wanted to use the Tu-144LL for a transatlantic record attempt, despite the high cost of a flight readiness overhaul even if military authorities would authorize the use of NK-321 engines outside Russian Federation airspace. |
Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde
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Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde (British Airways) Part 1
531 pages
Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde is a British-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger jet airliner that was operated until 2003. It had a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound at Mach 2.04 (1,354 mph at cruise altitude), with seating for 92 to 128 passengers. First flown in 1969, Concorde entered service in 1976 and continued flying for the next 27 years.
Photo credit: Eduard Marmet (CC-BY-SA 3.0) |
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Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde (British Airways) Part 2a
531 pages
Concorde is one of only two supersonic transports to have been operated commercially; the other is the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144, which was operated for a much shorter period.
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Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde (British Airways) Part 2b
511 pages
Concorde was jointly developed and manufactured by Sud (later Aérospatiale) and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) under an Anglo-French treaty. Twenty aircraft were built, including six prototypes and development aircraft. Air France (AF) and British Airways (BA) were the only airlines to purchase and fly Concorde. The aircraft was primarily used by wealthy passengers who could afford to pay a high price in exchange for Concorde's speed and luxury service. Among other destinations, Concorde flew regular transatlantic flights from London's Heathrow Airport and Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Washington Dulles International Airport and Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados; it flew these routes in less than half the time of other airliners.
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Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde (Air France) Volume 1 (French)
623 pages
Concorde's name, meaning "harmony" or "union", was chosen to reflect the co-operation on the project between the United Kingdom and France. In the UK, any or all of the type are known simply as Concorde, with no definite article the. Concorde won the 2006 Great British Design Quest organised by the BBC and the Design Museum, beating other well-known designs such as the BMC Mini, the miniskirt, the Jaguar E-Type, the London Tube map and the Supermarine Spitfire.
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Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde (Air France) Volume 2 (French)
1379 pages
On 25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590, registration F-BTSC, crashed in Gonesse, France after departing from Paris-Charles de Gaulle en route to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, killing all 100 passengers and 9 crew members on board the flight, and 4 people on the ground. It was the only fatal accident involving Concorde.
This, combined with increasing difficulty in obtaining replacement parts for the aging Concorde fleet, ultimately led to the type's retirement. The final Concorde flight took place on November 26, 2003 with a ferry flight landing at Filton, Bristol, UK. Of the twenty Concordes produced, 18 remain intact. One of the youngest Concordes (F-BTSD) is on display at Le Bourget Air and Space Museum in Paris. In February 2010, it was announced that the museum and a group of volunteer Air France technicians intend to restore F-BTSD so it can taxi under its own power. In May 2010, it was reported that the British Save Concorde Group and French Olympus 593 groups had begun inspecting the engines of a Concorde at the French museum; their intent is to restore the airliner to a condition where it can fly in demonstrations. Save Concorde Group hoped to get F-BTSD flying for the 2012 London Olympics, but this never happened. The work for restoring F-BTSD to operating condition as of September 2015 is currently not very well known, and it is still being housed in Le Bourget as a museum exhibit. In 2015, the organisation Club Concorde announced that it had raised funds of £120 million for a static display and to buy the Concorde at Le Bourget, restore it and return it to service as a heritage aircraft for air displays and charter hire by 2019, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Concorde's first flight. |
Douglas DC-8 (no, really!)
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Douglas DC-8 Flight Operating Manual
593 pages
Did you know? Before Concorde, before the Tu-144, only one other commercial airliner had ever intentionally broken the sound barrier.
On August 21, 1961, a Douglas DC-8-43 piloted by William Magruder took off from Edwards Air Force Base with only 30 minutes of fuel, climbed to 52,000 feet (a record for a civilian airliner) and then entered a controlled dive, reaching Mach 1.01 at 45,000 feet and finally recovering at 35,000 feet. In addition to the civilian airliner altitude record, it also set a supersonic load record. It would take nearly eight years (5 June 1969) for the Tupolev Tu-144, the first civilian SST, to go supersonic and challenge these feats. Going supersonic in a DC-8 is probably illegal. Don't try it at home. Photo credit: Steve Fitzgerald (GFDL 1.2) |
Photo credit: RIA Novosti Archive (CC-BY-SA 3.0)