Posts about: "Tu-144" [Posts: 25 Page: 2 of 2]¶

Thanks for following up my question, johnjosh43, and also for posting the TU144 link; I shall take a gander tonight.

I suspect that, given the Concorde's rather unusual fuel consumption figures, the most efficient climb profile was also the fastest one, since pretty much anything other than the M2.0 cruise-climb was fairly inefficient. From way back in the thread ( here ) the minimum time to hit M1.0 was about six minutes, and M2.0 came at 9 minutes (although a few posts later someone mentions that these figures may be wrong as the fuel transfer rate wouldn't allow such a fast climb).

Some questions from me, after reading through the thread:

- Someone mentioned that, as a result of Concorde's sustained supercruising across the Atlantic, the twenty-odd Concordes have more supersonic flight hours than all other aircraft combined. Does anyone know what the figures are?

- What was the minimum range for supersonic travel to be worthwhile? Obviously if you were only going a few hundred kilometres it'd make more sense to cruise at 29000ft an M0.95 rather than climbing all the way up to 40000ft+ and M2.0.

- What other aircraft are/were more efficient supersonic than subsonic? The modern supercruising fighter jets (eg. the F-22) are still more efficient at subsonic speeds. The original Tu-144 would certainly have been much more efficient subsonic (since it couldn't supercruise); I'm not sure about the later models. The SR-71 was more efficient at high supersonic speeds than at low supersonic speeds, but I can't find anything about subsonic fuel consumption. And that leaves the XB-70, which is just a big unknown.

Getting somewhat closer to the topic - does anyone know what the Tu-144 used for computing? The NASA report on the Tu-144LL says that they had a digital controls for the engines, but since those were new engines the control system was probably a good deal more modern than the original. I can't see any mention of how the intakes were controlled, or what the original engines used.

And really on-topic, was there any work done towards updating this for Concorde-B? Or did they never get that far? Or was the plan to just keep using exactly the same stuff, since it was already working so well?

Most people are familiar with the space race between the US and the Soviets, but there was a very interesting race between the US, Europe and the Soviet Union to build a supersonic passenger aircraft. Europe built the successful Concorde, the US had the unsuccessful Boeing SST, and the Soviets had the unsuccessful Tu-144.

Somewhere there is a taped phone conversation of President Kennedy raising heck with someone over the fact that the US does not have a supersonic passenger aircraft program to compete with Concorde.

megan

I thought the Tu-144 had canards instead, leading to an entirely new world of weight and complexity pain.