Biggest Waste of Money In Aviation History

The Soviet Concorde is arguably the biggest waste of money in aviation history since it was entirely built for propaganda purposes.

The Concordski

Dubbed Concordski in the West, the Soviet Tupolev Tu 144 was never intended as a passenger jet. The plane was built for one reason and that is to become the first supersonic commercial jet to fly.

However, if you put that title aside, the first Tu 144 was so bad that the second version of the airframe was essentially a completely different aircraft.

It was also the last passenger jet to be equipped with parachutes and the only jet to be ever fitted with ejection seats.

A Copy of the Concorde?

Westerners thought that the only way the Soviets could design a supersonic jet was by stealing Concorde’s design. However, this is a severely exaggerated claim. While the KGB was indeed spying on the Concorde program, the Soviets solved several problems on their own.

While on the outside, both planes looked similar there were many differences. The Tu-44 was larger, carrying more passengers.

The engines were also stacked together on the Tu-144 compared to the Concorde where the engines were split into two compartments. The Tu-144’s later version also included canards.

Another major difference was the landing gear. The Tu-144 had twelve wheels attached in three rows compared to the Concorde’s four wheels.

Extremely Unreliable

On June 1, 1978, only seven months after the start of the plane’s passenger service, the Tu-144 was withdrawn from service for two reasons.

First was an accident during the new Tu-144D’s test flight which killed two crew members. The second reason was that it was extremely unreliable.

All in all, Aeroflot conducted 102 scheduled flights during which there were 226 malfunctions and 80 of those serious enough to cancel or delay the flight. During its 7 months of service, 55 passenger flights took place carrying only 3284 passengers.

Concordski was never even capable of achieving what Concorde did, which was to carry over 3 million passengers over 27 years.

The Soviets just wanted to earn the bragging rights to say they built the first supersonic commercial aircraft and after 15 years of trying to make the plane work, the program was canceled in 1984.