TU - 104 - the fastest aircraft (10 photos)

The world's first passenger jet airliner was the British de Havilland DH.106 Comet, whose regular flights began on May 2, 1952. However, in 1954, after a series of disasters, flights of this aircraft were banned personally by Churchill until the reasons were clarified. The USSR had a chance to become the only country at that time with its own passenger airliner, the development of which began in the same 1954.

The first production TU-104 took off on November 5, 1955. The aircraft was developed in record time. Problems arose with it - sometimes during the flight the TU-104 was suddenly thrown up, after which it temporarily lost control. Pilots called this effect "pickup." Naturally, they looked for the reason for this, but could not quickly find it. They decided to continue operating the aircraft and resume testing.

Khrushchev liked the TU-104 so much that he decided to make his visit to Great Britain in 1956 on it. Due to the above problems, it was difficult to dissuade him from this. The Soviet delegation went to London on a cruiser. But in order to prove Soviet technological superiority (the British Comet still did not fly), Khrushchev ordered the TU-104 to be brought to London.

The arrival of the Soviet airliner, according to the British press, produced an effect comparable to the landing of a UFO. The next day, a second copy of TU-104, with a different number, arrived in London. A message appeared in British newspapers that it was the same plane, and the “Russian priests” were “repainting the numbers on their experimental plane.” “Russian priests” are Russian pilots dressed all in black. Chief designer A.N. Tupolev was offended, and, firstly, ordered funds to be allocated for the pilots to dress in something fashionable and not black, and the next day, March 25, 1956, to send three TU-104s to London at once, which was done.
It was a triumph - after all, at that time, no other country in the world had operating jet passenger airliners.

But the above problem with the plane being tossed up has not gone away. On August 15, 1958, TU-104 lost control completely and crashed in the Chita area. 64 people died. Tupolev denied that the aircraft had any design flaws and believed that the pilots simply flew the aircraft poorly.
On October 17, 1958, the TU-104, piloted by Harold Kuznetsov, left the flight level upward, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell onto the wing and went into a tailspin.

The fall lasted only 2 minutes, and all this time Harold Kuznetsov, without losing his composure, broadcast information about the flight parameters. The plane crashed in Chuvashia, killing 73 people. But it was the information transmitted by Kuznetsov (and there were no “black boxes” yet) that made it possible to understand the reason for the “pickup”, which could not be determined before for three years.

Tupolev turned out to be wrong. The cause of the disaster was considered to be deficiencies in the design of the aircraft, which were eliminated. As with any other aircraft, plane crashes with the TU-104 subsequently occurred, but no longer due to “catch.”