GARAŽA forum

I was very disappointed with the programme because it did not include all the reasons behind my comments. But there we go, I am grown up and should have expected that.

Was it a copy of Concorde? Of course not. As anybody in the business knows it was a bigger machine had a different wing plan form (double delta) and a different engine layout. Was there spying? Yes. But this was to give both sides a better understanding of the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses when it came to the sales bit. (Just as we wanted to know all about the Alpha Jet when doing the Hawk – only newspapers would suggest it was to copy. There is more to the engineering and aerodynamics of any aircraft than a few drawings)

I had met Valezi Moltchnov, one of the pilots who was flying it at Paris, at the Hanover show a year earlier when I was displaying the first development Harrier and Valezi had one of the Tu-144 prototypes minus the very important canards that appeared later at Paris. He had come up to me as I was nosing around under his aircraft and finished up giving me the complete tour. We had got on like a house on fire and his English was probably better than mine. As a result, we later talked aeroplanes for several days as we wandered around the show. He was as sharp as a tack as evidenced when I asked whether he had any hobbies and he replied “Reading Flight and Aviation Week”. However, one probably had to have lived through the height of the Cold War to appreciate just how meaningful that was coming from a Russian in 1972. One night Valezi and I went to a shooting club in Hanover with his boss, Tupolev CTP Edward Elyan and German WWII fighter ace Adolf Galland. Not surprisingly, Galland thrashed me at shooting. I would have liked a return match in a hovering vehicle but life is not always that fair.

Back to Paris 1973. On the Sunday and last day of the show, fellow Dunsfold pilot Andy Jones and I were watching the Tu-144 display with considerable interest. We had been amazed earlier in the week at how much slower the aircraft could land now it was fitted with the canards. These retractable mini wings, when extended during takeoff and landing, generated so much nose up force that on the approach the wing trailing edge control surfaces were now deflected downwards giving in effect a delta with flaps down. At Hanover, without the canards, the aircraft had been like Concorde, the HP115 and the T221 and needed the trailing edge controls to be up for the approach and landing flare. This meant these three aircraft were in effect fitted with flaps working the wrong way round and so reducing lift. The lower approach speed possible with this new ‘flapped delta’ allowed the Tu-144 to land on the display runway 03 and exit at the second turn-off, which was a distance of some 1,200 metres.

Their display sequence included a touch and go on 03, followed by an initial steep climb then an immediate turn onto the downwind for the final landing, a manoeuvre almost amounting to a wingover given the cloud base during the week was below 2,000 ft. On the Sunday however, there was not a cloud in the sky and their initial steep climb after the touch and go was continued straight ahead to perhaps 4,000 ft. Then suddenly the aircraft violently bunted to level flight. Both Andy and I gasped at seeing such a push in that class of aircraft. As we looked at the retreating aeroplane flying away level, we had time to say to each other that it looked as if they were going home and we were going to be denied watching another full stop landing. Then down went the nose and the aircraft made as if to descend and turn back to the downwind leg. When it was about half way to the ground and having rolled left through 90o, so giving us a side view of the dive, something made me say to Andy “He’s going in”.

Even though it was still a long way up, that something which suggested to me that the crew had lost it was a mixture of height, unchanging steep nose down attitude and rate of descent. Suddenly the picture looked wrong. I have seen many aeroplanes come to grief at air displays and, if you are a display pilot yourself, you develop a feel for when the picture is wrong. Just as I said that to Andy, the aircraft started to pull out of the dive and for a moment we both felt it might just miss the ground but it broke up at about 1,000 ft.

My belief is that whatever caused the bunt caused the accident because I don’t believe the engines could have swallowed the appalling flow into the intakes produced by that much negative alpha without surging. Some people noticed an orbiting Mirage above them as they climbed but I did not. (The mirage actually can be seen very briefly on the BBC programme video of the accident). However, if the crew had unexpectedly seen another aircraft not far above them, then the sudden push we saw would have been instinctive. If the engines did all surge, then this would have necessitated a shut down and relight which would have required a pretty determined dive to obtain the necessary windmilling rpm. My guess is that, as they were busy trying to get some engines restarted, they suddenly saw the ground coming up and overcooked the pull, possibly due to the very nasty view of some 230ft electricity pylons that were right across their flight path.

I wish you luck but with your use of the name Concordski I fear the worst.

The Tu-144 was considerably bigger than Concorde, had a different wing plan form (cranked delta instead of ogival), had a totally different engine layout, flew before Concorde and once the canards were fitted touched down very much slower than Concord thanks to the flapped delta effect that was then possible.

The Soviet espionage programme against Concorde was in order that they could learn all they could about Concorde and so be better prepared to compete with it round the sales table. If you feel it was in any way a copy of Concord you are ignoring the facts.

The Tu-144 programme failed not because of the aerodynamics of the airframe but because the propulsion system (intake, engine and nozzle combination) was much less efficient in a Mach 2 cruise than that fitted to Concord.

Djole napisao: 02 Jan 2019, 16:55 Da li je ovo realno izvodljivo?