On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov, has reportedly promised to show the world that his aircraft can out-fly the Anglo-French Concorde. The white delta climbs away steeply, all four engines roaring at full power — and then, impossibly high and impossibly slow, it falters. The nose drops. The jet plunges toward the ground, the pilots fighting it, until the left wing tears clean away. The Tu-144 rolls onto its back, breaks apart, and rains burning wreckage down onto the village of Goussainville below.

Six crew and eight people on the ground died that day, three of them children. In a few seconds, in front of the whole aviation world, the Soviet dream of beating the West to the supersonic age came apart in the Paris sky.

The race the Soviets were determined to win

By the late 1960s, supersonic passenger travel looked like the inevitable future, and two camps were racing for it: the Anglo-French partnership building Concorde, and the Soviet Union, which was desperate to get there first. National pride was on the line on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

And the Soviets did get there first. The Tu-144 made its maiden flight on 31 December 1968 — two months ahead of Concorde. It was the first airliner ever to fly supersonic, the first to reach twice the speed of sound. On paper, the West had been beaten.

“Konkordski”: similar, but not the same

To Western eyes the Tu-144 looked uncannily like Concorde, and the resemblance was no accident. The Soviet Union was widely accused of stealing Concorde’s design secrets through espionage, and the mocking nickname “Konkordski” stuck. But beneath the similar silhouette, the two aircraft were very different machines — and the differences were where the Tu-144’s troubles lived.

The result was an aircraft that won the race on the calendar but lost it on refinement. Where Concorde was a polished, if extravagant, machine, the Tu-144 was a rushed one — and the pressure to look unbeatable in public would prove deadly.

The crash that was never fully explained

What actually doomed the Tu-144 at Le Bourget has never been settled. The official inquiry reached no firm conclusion. The most enduring theory is that, during its climb, the crew were startled by a French Mirage chase plane sent up to photograph them, and threw the airliner into a violent evasive manoeuvre it could not survive. Some investigators also point to the flight controls having been de-restricted before the display, allowing a more dramatic — and more dangerous — routine.

Whatever the trigger, the politics were delicate: with Cold War prestige and a French airfield both involved, neither side was eager to assign blame, and the full story stayed murky for decades.

Original footage of the Tu-144’s fatal break-up at the 1973 Paris Air Show. (Viewer discretion: this is a real fatal accident.)

A footnote, where it wanted to be a legend

The Tu-144 limped on. It finally began carrying passengers in 1977 on the Moscow–Almaty route, but it was unreliable and uneconomic, and after a second Tu-144 crashed during a test flight in 1978, Aeroflot quietly ended passenger service that same year — after only a few dozen flights. Just sixteen were ever built.

Concorde, by contrast, went on to fly elegantly for twenty-seven years. The Tu-144 — first into the air, first past the sound barrier, first to Mach 2 — is remembered instead for a single catastrophic afternoon in Paris. It is one of aviation’s great cautionary tales: the danger of caring more about being first than about being right.

Sources: FlightGlobal; Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; AeroTime; Wikipedia.