On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any propeller-driven aircraft.

IL Tupolev Tu-95 bomber gave the Soviet Union a strategic aircraft that could outrun most of what was sent to intercept it. The Tu-114 was what happened when Tupolev put a passenger cabin on it.

A bomber with a new middle

The Tu-114 kept the Tu-95's 35-degree swept wing, its tail, its engines and its main landing gear. What was new was everything in between: a much wider pressurised fuselage, mounted low instead of mid-set, with bigger flaps and a taller nose gear to keep those enormous propellers clear of the ground.

Those propellers are the point. Each NK-12MV drives a pair of contra-rotating four-blade units on a single shaft — eight blades per engine, thirty-two in total, each set 5.6 m across. It is the arrangement that makes the Tu-95 the loudest aircraft in the sky, and the Tu-114 inherited it along with the speed.

Washington, 1959

Nikita Khrushchev flew to the United States in a Tu-114 that was still, technically, in flight testing. It arrived at Andrews Air Force Base on 15 September 1959 after a non-stop run from Moscow against headwinds reported at around 100 mph.

Andrei Tupolev put his son Alexei aboard as a demonstration of confidence in an aircraft that had not finished its trials. Khrushchev, in his own account, preferred not to advertise the fact.

Then there are the airstairs. The story that no set of steps in America was tall enough to reach the doors is often told and hard to pin down at Andrews specifically — but the phenomenon is real and was witnessed a month earlier at Le Bourget, where Volo reported that conventional airline stairs, fully elevated, "got nowhere near the passenger doors" and the crew had to lower a ten-foot ladder. The aircraft simply stood too tall on that stretched nose gear.

Mustard’s film on the Tu-114 — the best single explanation of how a bomber became the fastest airliner of its kind.

Havana, Tokyo, and the limits of range

The Tu-114's job was to reach places the Soviet Union could not otherwise reach. Moscow to Havana began with a technical flight on 10 July 1962, routed via Conakry; American pressure closed Conakry, then Dakar, then Algiers. The eventual answer was the Tu-114D, a 60-seat variant that refuelled at Olenya near Murmansk and went the long way over the Atlantic.

The Tokyo service was stranger still. Under a 1966 agreement, Moscow-Tokyo flights began on 17 April 1967 operated jointly with Japan Air Lines: Soviet flight crew plus a JAL crew member, five Aeroflot and five JAL cabin staff, and JAL titles painted on the forward fuselage of an aircraft derived from a nuclear bomber.

Fast, and then finished

Only 32 were built. In fifteen years of service the type had one fatal accident: on 17 February 1966 an aircraft taking off at night from Sheremetyevo struck an uncleared snow bank, veered off and burned. Twenty-one of the 66 people aboard were killed, according to Soviet records; contemporary Western wire reports gave higher figures.

Its career ended not through obsolescence in the usual sense but through metal fatigue: the airframe was cleared for 14,000 hours, and the Il-62 could do the job on jets. A ministry order of 11 May 1976 withdrew the type, and the last flight was on 2 December that year. Most were scrapped within a year.

Three survive. The prototype CCCP-L5611 — Khrushchev's aircraft — is at Monino outside Moscow; another is at Ulyanovsk; a third stood at Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine, last confirmed by photograph in 2018.

A closer look at the airframe, the contraprops and the cabin layouts.

Sixty-six years on, nothing with a propeller has flown faster in a sanctioned record attempt. The turbofan made the question irrelevant before anyone tried very hard to beat it — which is the neatest possible summary of the Tu-114: a magnificent answer to a question the world had already stopped asking.

Sources: FAI record database (archived); Volo, 21 August 1959; UPI Archives, 15 September 1959; Gordon & Rigmant, Tupolev Tu-114; Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft; Storia dell'aviazione (Guttman, 2019); Aviation Safety Network; Wikipedia cross-checks.