Gerry Brooke looks at the story behind the ill fated Russian Concordski project

It was the last day of 1968 when a Tupolev TU-144 – nicknamed “Concordski” by the West – took off from an airfield near Moscow.

The Soviets’ supersonic plane had beaten the Anglo-French Concorde project into the air by a good two months.

Faster and larger than Concorde, the Russian version could carry 140 passengers, in contrast to Concorde’s 100, and travel up to 1,600mph, while the Anglo-French version could only reach 1,350mph.

The Concordski had some individual characteristics, such as carrying its engine on the fuselage instead of on the wings.

It also had smaller wings, or canards, to stabilise the aircraft.

“The two planes looked almost identical, but the Russians never really got it off the ground and it certainly never stopped Concorde’s development in Bristol,” said Oliver Dearden of the Bristol Aero Collection.

Espionage had long been suspected, and it was later revealed that the plane had been designed and built in the USSR with help from a Bristol spy, James Doyle, who admitted selling Concorde secrets to the KGB for nearly £5,000.

Doyle – known to the Russians as agent “Ace” – worked as an electrical engineer at the Filton factory when the supersonic jet was being designed and built.

The double agent was officially unmasked in a book by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrews in 1999.

Doyle, who later changed his name to Jimmy Cameron, has now taken his secrets with him to the grave.

But if the Russians thought they had stolen a march on their rivals it all came crashing down around their ears at the Paris Air Show in 1973.

In front of a crowd of 200,000 people, a displaying TU-144 broke up.

The fuel tank exploded and she nose-dived into the ground.

All six crew were killed as well as eight people on the ground.

It was rumoured that the pilot may have been trying to avoid a French Mirage jet sent up to spy on him – but maybe it was just pilot error.

Whatever the cause, this very public crash dealt the Soviet project a severe blow.

But in 1975, after several modifications, a Tupolev was put into service on USSR mail flights.

Two years later Concordski operated its first passenger flight – from Moscow to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. But these commercial flights were short- lived.

Just a year later, a modified plane, a TU-144D, crash-landed.

Nine days later, after just 102 flights, the Soviets’ supersonic service was terminated.

No more Tupolevs were ever built.