The aircraft involved was Tupolev Tu-144S СССР-77102, manufacturer's serial number 01–2, the second production Tu-144.^[7] The aircraft had first flown on 29 March 1972.^[8] This aircraft had been modified compared to the initial prototype to include landing gear that retracted into the nacelles, and retractable canards.^[9] The pilot was Mikhail Kozlov,^[6] and the co-pilot was Valery M. Molchanov.^[10] Also on board were G. N. Bazhenov, the flight navigator, V. N. Benderov, deputy chief designer and engineer major-general, B. A. Pervukhin, senior engineer, and A. I. Dralin, flight engineer.^[11] The crash occurred in front of 250,000 people toward the end of the show.^[6]

During the show, there was a "fierce competition between the Anglo-French Concorde and the Soviet Tu-144".^[6] The Soviet pilot, Mikhail Kozlov, had bragged that he would outperform the Concorde.^[6] "Just wait until you see us fly," he was quoted as saying. "Then you'll see something."^[12] On the final day of the show, the Concorde, which was not yet in production, performed its demonstration flight first.^[6] Its performance was later described as being unexciting, and it has been theorized that Kozlov was determined to show how much better his aircraft was.^[12]

Once in flight, the Tu-144 made what appeared to be a landing approach, with the landing gear out and the "moustache" canards extended, but then with all four engines at full power, climbed rapidly. Possibly stalling below 2,000 ft (600 m), the aircraft pitched over and went into a steep dive.^[6] Trying to pull out of the subsequent dive with the engines again at full power, the aircraft broke up in mid-air, possibly due to overstressing the airframe. The left wing came away first, and then the aircraft disintegrated and crashed,^[6][8][10] destroying 15 houses,^[13] and killing all six people on board the Tu-144 and eight more on the ground.^[8] Three children were among those killed, and 60 people received severe injuries.^[14]

The crew of the Tu-144 were buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow on 12 June 1973.^[15]

Following the crash, Marcel Dassault called for the 1975 Paris Air Show to be held at Istres, which is situated in open country 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Marseille.^[16]

The crash reduced the enthusiasm of Aeroflot for the Tu-144. Restrictions on the Tu-144 following the Paris Air Show crash meant that it only saw limited service during 1977 and 1978, and it was finally withdrawn following another crash in May 1978.^[7] The Tu-144's rival, the Concorde, went on to serve with British Airways and Air France for 30 years afterwards, being finally withdrawn from service in 2003 due to low passenger numbers following the crash of Flight 4590 (coincidentally also within the vicinity of Le Bourget), rising service costs and the slump in the aviation industry following the September 11 attacks.^[17]

Investigation edit

The accident was investigated by the DTCE, part of the French military, which was responsible for accidents involving prototype aircraft in France. The wreckage was recovered to a hangar at Le Bourget, with some of it being flown by an Antonov An-22 to the Soviet Union.^[10] The official report from the French investigative commission, produced in collaboration with Soviet experts, proposed a hypothesis involving a French jet plane in proximity and an unsecured Tu-144 crew member with a film camera, which might have inadvertently blocked the controls during an evasion manoeuvre. However, due to a lack of concrete evidence supporting this theory, the commission concluded that the exact cause of the disaster remains undetermined. While the investigation's outcome was largely suitable for both sides, it gave rise to a number of alternative theories.^[18]

Theories edit

One theory is that the Tu-144 maneuvered to avoid a French Mirage chase plane that was attempting to photograph its unique canards,^[19] which were advanced for the time, and that the French and Soviet governments colluded with each other to cover up break-up of the plane during a pull-up maneuver.^[14] The flight of the Mirage was denied in the original French report of the incident,^{[citation needed]} perhaps because it was engaged in industrial espionage. More recent reports have admitted the existence of the Mirage (and the fact that the Soviet crew were not told about the Mirage's flight), although not its role in the crash. However, the official press release did state: "though the inquiry established that there was no real risk of collision between the two aircraft, the Soviet pilot was likely to have been surprised."^[14] Howard Moon, author of Soviet SST: The Techno-Politics Of The Tupolev-144, stresses that last-minute changes to the flight schedule would have disoriented the pilots in a cockpit with notably poor sightlines. He also cites an eyewitness who claims the co-pilot had agreed to take a camera with him, which he may have been operating at the time of the evasive maneuver.^[14] The initial approach may have been an attempted landing on the wrong runway, which occurred due to a last-minute shortening of the Tu-144's display.^[5]

An important contributing factor could be that control surfaces deflection had been de-restricted before the flight, perhaps to allow a more impressive demonstration, giving way for a bug of the electronics flight controls which deflected the elevons 10 degrees down after the retraction of the canards, causing the sudden dive.^[8]

Bob Hoover, a pilot on the supersonic Bell X-1 program, 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 [feet] before leveling off. When the Tu-144 pilot performed the same manoeuvre he pulled the nose up so steeply I didn't believe he could possibly recover."^[5]

• Accident description on the Aviation Safety Network