SimAirline.net - Viewpoint

As a lead-up to the future launch of Aeroflot Virtual, SimAirline.net will be offering pilots the opportunity to fly the Tupolev Tu-144, the first supersonic airliner and the fastest commercial airliner ever produced, at Concorde Virtual. First flying on 31 December 1968, a full two months before Concorde took to the skies for the first time, the Tu-144 was both ahead of and behind its Western counterpart. While faster and larger, it lacked the same range as Concorde and could not supercruise, or cruise without afterburners (although this was fixed in a subsequent model). Coupled with difficult handling which led to two crashes, the program was eventually cancelled.

The Tu-144 entered service on 26 December 1975 as a mail plane and began passenger service just under two years later. Regularly scheduled passenger service ended on 1 June 1978 following a crash one week earlier. Despite officially being withdrawn from service, it was put back into service for one or two flights a year as recently as 1987. In the mid-1990s one of the planes was refurbished as a flying laboratory for NASA and flew several flights until being grounded once again by budget considerations.

Sadly, most of the aircraft now have either been scrapped or lay derelict at various airports in western Russia. Only one is on display outside the country, at the Auto and Technik Museum in Sinsheim, Germany, where it is displayed next to an Air France Concorde.

SimAirline.net will be offering daily Aeroflot flights between Moscow Domodedovo and Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), the only regularly scheduled route.