NASA’s Flight Test of the Russian Tu-144 SST

Robert A. Rivers

The aeronautics community has always had a strong international flavor. This case study traces how NASA researches in the late 1990s used a Russian supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144LL — built as a visible symbol of technological prowess at the height of the Cold War—to derive supersonic cruise and aerodynamic data. Despite numerous technical, organizational, and political challenges, the joint research team obtained valuable information and engendered much goodwill.

N A COOL, CLEAR, AND GUSTY SEPTEMBER MORNING in 1998, two NASA research pilots flew a one-of-a-kind, highly modi­fied Russian Tupolev Tu-144LL Mach 2 Supersonic Transport (SST) side by side with a Tupolev test pilot, navigator, and flight engi­neer from a formerly secret Soviet-era test facility, the Zhukovsky Air Development Center 45 miles southeast of Moscow, on the first of 3 flights to be flown by Americans.[1458] These flights in Phase II of the joint United States-Russian Tu-144 flight experiments sponsored by NASA’s High-Speed Research (HSR) program were the culmination of 5 years of preparation and cooperation by engineers, technicians, and pilots in the largest joint aeronautics program ever accomplished by the two countries. The two American pilots became the first and only non­Russian pilots to fly the former symbol of Soviet aeronautics prowess, the Soviet counterpart of the Anglo-French Concorde SST.

They completed a comprehensive handling qualities evaluation of the Tu-144 while 6 other experiments gathered data from hundreds of onboard sensors that had been painstakingly mounted to the airframe
in the preceding 3 years by NASA, Tupolev, and Boeing engineers and technicians. Only four more flights in the program awaited the Tu-144LL, the last of its kind, before it was retired. With the removal from service of the Concorde several years later, the world lost its only supersonic passenger aircraft and witnessed the end of an amazing era.

This is the story of a remarkable flight experiment involving the United States and Russia, NASA and Tupolev, and the men and women who worked together to accomplish a series of unique flight tests from late 1996 to early 1999 while overcoming numerous technical, program­matic, and political obstacles. What they accomplished in the late 1990s cannot be accomplished today. There are no more Supersonic Transports to be used as test platforms, no more national programs to explore com­mercial supersonic flight. NASA and Tupolev established a benchmark for international cooperation and trust while producing data of incal­culable value with a class of vehicles that no longer exists in a regime that cannot be reached by today’s transport airplanes.[1459]