From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   QUORA: What is the worst plane ever made?   
   answered by Owen Lee, United Kingdom (2000–present), Apr 25   
   The Tu-144!     
   This is what happens when you steal notes from the nerds   
   without doing any due diligence!  The Tu-144 was supposed to be    
   the USSR’s answer to the Concorde and the then-not-cancelled    
   Boeing 2707. It was rushed into service, to allow the USSR to get    
   bragging rights over getting their sh!tbox into service before    
   Concorde. It was technically faster, and carried more passengers.   
   However, the plane’s flaws were manifold:   
      
   Firstly, the plane needed fuel hungry afterburners to stay at    
   its Mach 2.2 cruising speed, which made its range absolutely    
   hopeless; just 6,000 km, which is simply not good enough for this    
   type of plane.  Concorde, by contrast, had a range of well over    
   7,000 km, allowing it to fly across the Atlantic.   
      
   Secondly, the plane was hideously uncomfortable, with the plane’s    
   rushed roots resulting in a much more primitive cooling system    
   that generated phenomenal levels of noise; passengers recall being    
   unable to talk to the people next to them, being forced to either    
   shout or otherwise pass notes. You thought being on a 747 with a    
   screaming baby was bad? The Tu-144 will make that baby sound like    
   Tchaikovsky by comparison!   
      
   Thirdly, it was hilariously unreliable. The plane only ever made    
   105 flights, and in those 105, there were 80 of them where a major   
   mechanical malfunction occurred, with blind luck and/or the pilots   
   bravery being the only things that stopped the plane from becoming    
   a crater in Kazakhstan.   
      
   Finally, landing the beast was a complete nightmare, with a drogue   
   parachute being required just to bring the thing to a halt without    
   doing a runway overrun.   
   Note: If your plane requires bloody drogue parachutes for a scheduled   
   passenger service, you may want to rethink your design…   
      
   The 144 only ever had one scheduled route, from Moscow, Russia to   
   Almaty, Kazakhstan. And this route was only once per week, in spite    
   of there being 8 available aircraft. Yep, the Soviets claimed a    
   “regular” service was available, without mentioning that said service    
   was the bare minimum required to qualify as “regular”, much like the    
   UK’s parliamentary trains. Goes to show how little confidence even    
   the Kremlin had in this boondoggle of a plane.   
      
   But for the real kicker, the plane’s design was deliberately flawed.    
   As it turned out, the KGB’s Directorate T had spied extensively on    
   the Concorde program. Eventually, the French engineers were able to    
   get a rough idea of who the moles in their group were, and began using    
   this to their advantage, by supplying deliberately flawed blueprints    
   to the spies. Famously, a sample of “tyre scrapings” was given to a    
   spy, who didn’t know that, in fact, he’d been sold a dummy; the rubber    
   sample would, if brewed up in any significant quantities, have the    
   consistency of bubble gum.   
      
   All of this eventually led to the Tu-144’s biggest disaster, and on    
   the world stage: The Paris Air Show disaster.  In 1973, Concorde and    
   the Tu-144 met in Paris for the biannual airshow, in front of the    
   cameras of the world. Concorde’s pilots put on a fantastic show, with a    
   daring manoeuvre at the end which pushed the Concorde far beyond its    
   usual comfort zone.  The pilot of the Tu-144 fired up his heavy beast,    
   determined to outshine the Concorde, and this is where things went wrong.   
      
   As it turned out, the pilot of the 144 pushed his plane to its absolute   
   theoretical limits in order to put on a better show; however, what he   
   hadn’t known was that his plane was simply not capable of going through   
   what he wanted it to do; as it turned out, the 144’s panels were, in   
   ground testing, failing at approximately 70% of their listed yield   
   values. His plane, made of substandard panels, simply disintegrated   
   around him, crashing to the earth in a gigantic fireball. All 6 on board   
   were killed, as were 8 on the ground; one victim, a 12 year old boy   
   practicing his violin, was decapitated by a piece of flying debris.   
      
   A plane which manages to have 2 crashes and 80 serious mechanical   
   failures in just 105 flights, over half of which were cargo-only due to   
   Soviet Leadership’s total lack of confidence that the plane would even   
   work after they ordered it rushed into service, must rank as one of the   
   worst planes ever built.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)