A birthday chosen later

Tupolev’s official birthday is a choice. In 1922 a commission for building metal aircraft was set up at Moscow’s TsAGI aerodynamic institute under Andrei Tupolev, a protégé of the aviation pioneer Nikolay Zhukovsky. Twenty-five years later, on the eve of the bureau’s jubilee, Tupolev himself proposed 22 October 1922 as the date to celebrate, and it stuck. The team had started small, with aerosleds and a wooden glider boat, and its first aeroplane, the little ANT-1, flew on 21 October 1923. What followed was 50 years under one man and, by the company’s count, more than 300 projects, about 90 built and more than 18,000 aircraft produced by Soviet factories.

Giants in corrugated metal

Tupolev learned from Hugo Junkers. His early aircraft were all-metal, skinned in corrugated duralumin, starting with the ANT-2 of 1924. The TB-1 twin-engined bomber of 1925 was among the most advanced of its day, and the four-engined TB-3 that grew from it was built 818 times; in 1937 one landed at the North Pole. Then came the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky, with eight engines and a 63-metre wing, the largest aircraft in the world in the 1930s and the flagship of a propaganda squadron. On 18 May 1935 an escorting I-5 fighter looped around it, struck it, and both fell into a Moscow suburb. Forty-five people died.

Over the Pole

The bureau’s most famous record aircraft looked almost delicate: the single-engined ANT-25, with a wing built for range. In July 1936 Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baydukov and Alexander Belyakov flew it 9,374 km from Moscow to an island near the mouth of the Amur. On 18–20 June 1937 the same crew flew over the North Pole to America, running short of fuel and landing at Vancouver, Washington. Three weeks later Mikhail Gromov, Andrey Yumashev and Sergey Danilin went further, 11,500 km in 62 hours and 17 minutes, ending in a dairy pasture near San Jacinto, California. Chkalov’s ANT-25 was displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The designer in the sharashka

By then its designer was in prison. On 21 October 1937, at the height of the Great Purge, Tupolev was arrested with Vladimir Petlyakov and the whole TsAGI leadership on invented charges of sabotage and espionage. Many colleagues were shot. Tupolev was sent in 1939 to an NKVD sharashka, a prison design office, which became known as Tupolevka after its best-known inmate. Sentenced to ten years in 1940, he designed there the twin-engined Tu-2, which first flew on 29 January 1941 and became one of the best Soviet front-line bombers; 2,257 were built. He was released in July 1941 to do defence work, but not fully rehabilitated until 1955.

Copying the Superfortress

The post-war Soviet Union needed a strategic bomber at once, and in 1944 three repairable American B-29s had fallen into its hands after emergency landings. The order was to copy them. Tupolev’s team did, re-engineering the design for metric sheet metal, Soviet engines and weapons; the Tu-4 flew on 19 May 1947 and 847 were built. From that base came the swept-wing Tu-16 and, in 1952, the Tu-95, with four huge turboprops whose propeller tips go supersonic, making it one of the loudest military aircraft. A Tu-95 dropped the Tsar Bomba in 1961. Bears still fly; Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb destroyed several on their airfields on 1 June 2025.

Aeroflot’s jet age

The Tu-16 bomber also became an airliner. The Tu-104 entered Aeroflot service on 15 September 1956 and, after the British Comets were grounded, was for two years the only jetliner flying anywhere. The Tu-95 begat the Tu-114, still the fastest turboprop airliner ever built, and the Tu-124 of 1960 was the first turbofan airliner built in series. Then came the Tu-134 and the trijet Tu-154, 1,026 of which carried half of all Aeroflot passengers in 1990. On 10 April 2010 a Polish Air Force Tu-154 crashed in fog at Smolensk, killing all 96 on board, among them President Lech Kaczyński; investigators found no technical fault.

Supersonic, and after

Andrei Tupolev’s son Alexei led the bureau’s most ambitious airliner, the Tu-144. Rushed to meet a five-year-old government deadline, it flew on 31 December 1968, two months before Concorde. On 3 June 1973 the first production aircraft broke up during a display at the Paris Air Show, killing six crew and eight people on the ground in Goussainville. Passenger service lasted just 55 flights, ending in June 1978. The Tu-160 bomber of 1981 set 44 world records. Tupolev joined United Aircraft Corporation in 2006 and has been sanctioned since 2022; its Kazan plant delivered only one new Tu-214 in 2025 against far bigger state targets.

Fabrieken

• Kazan Aviation Plant named after S. P. Gorbunov (KAPO) · Kazan, Tatarstan — Tupolev branch; builds the Tu-214 and Tu-160; has built more than 18,000 aircraft of 34 types
• Zhukovsky flight test and development base · Zhukovsky, Moscow Oblast — Tupolev branch where prototypes such as the Tu-144 first flew
• Samara and Ulyanovsk design branches · Samara and Ulyanovsk — Design offices supporting series production
• 360th Aircraft Repair Plant · Ryazan — Under Tupolev management since 2018

Mensen

• Andrei Tupolev · founder and general designer, 1922–1972 — Imprisoned 1937–1941; three times Hero of Socialist Labour; Vnukovo airport named after him in 2018
• Alexei Tupolev · son of the founder, chief designer of the Tu-144 — Led the company until his death in 2001
• Vladimir Petlyakov · engineer — Arrested with Tupolev in 1937
• Valery Chkalov · test pilot — Flew the ANT-25 over the North Pole to the USA in 1937
• Mikhail Gromov · test pilot — First flew the ANT-25 in 1933; flew it Moscow to San Jacinto in 1937
• Igor Shevchuk · president and general designer, 2001–2009 — Died in 2011

Records en primeurs

• Largest aircraft in the world in the 1930s, ANT-20 Maxim Gorky (t4)
• Moscow to Vancouver, Washington, non-stop over the North Pole, ANT-25, 18–20 June 1937 (t5)
• Moscow to San Jacinto, California, 11,500 km in 62 hours 17 minutes, ANT-25, 12–14 July 1937 (t5)
• Only jetliner in regular service worldwide, Tu-104, 1956–1958 (t12)
• Fastest turboprop airliner ever built, Tu-114 (t1)
• First supersonic transport to fly, Tu-144, 31 December 1968; first commercial transport past Mach 2, 26 May 1970 (t17)
• Most powerful nuclear device ever detonated dropped by a modified Tu-95, 30 October 1961 (t11)
• 44 world speed records in its weight class, Tu-160, 1989–1990 (t21)