The Rise & Fall Of The SST

v1.0.0 / 01 aug 03 / greg goebel / public domain

* In the 1960s there was an international competition to build a supersonic transport (SST), which resulted in the development of two supersonic airliners, the Anglo-French "Concorde" and the Soviet Tupolev "Tu-144". Although the SST was seen as the way of the future, that wasn't how things actually turned out. This document provides a short history of the rise and fall of the supersonic transport.

[1] BOEING 2707-300
[2] AEROSPATIALE-BAC CONCORDE
[3] TUPOLEV TU-144
[4] FUTURE SSTS?
[5] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

[1] BOEING 2707-300

* With the push towards supersonic combat aircraft during the 1950s, aircraft manufacturers began to think about developing a supersonic airliner, what would eventually become known as a "supersonic transport (SST)". In 1961, Douglas Aircraft publicized a design study for an SST that would be capable of flying at Mach 3 at 21,350 meters (71,000 feet) and could be flying by 1970. Douglas forecast a market for hundreds of such machines.

At the time, there was no reason to believe such a forecast was unrealistic. During the 1950s, commercial air transport had made a radical shift from piston-powered airliners to the new jetliners like the Boeing 707. Going to an SST was simply the next logical step. In fact, as discussed in the next section, Europe was moving even faster down this road than the US. In 1962 the British and French signed an agreement to actually build an SST, the "Concorde". With the Europeans committed to the SST, of course the Americans had to follow, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) set up a competition for an SST that would be faster, bigger, and better than the Concorde.

In 1964, SST proposals from North American, Lockheed, and Boeing were selected as finalists. Although North American had built the two XB-70 Valkyrie experimental Mach 3 bombers, which had a configuration and performance similar to that of an SST and were used as testbeds for SST concepts, the company was eliminated from the competition in 1966. Lockheed proposed the "L-2000", which was a double-delta machine with a capacity of 220 passengers, but the winner was Boeing's "Model 2707", the name obviously implying a Mach 2 aircraft that would be as significant as the Boeing 707, with Boeing awarded a contract for two prototypes on 1 May 1967.

The 2707 was to be a large aircraft, about 90 meters (300 feet) long, with a maximum load of 350 passengers. It would be able to cruise at Mach 2.7 over a range of 6,440 kilometers (4,000 miles) with 313 passengers. It would use a variable geometry "swing wing" to permit efficient high-speed flight, with the wings swept back, and good low-speed handling, with the wings extended.

Powerplants were to be four General Electric GE-J5P afterburning turbojet engines, derived from the GE J93 engines used on the XB-70, with a maximum afterburning thrust of 267 kN (27,200 kgp / 60,000 lbf) each. The engines were to be fitted into separate individual nacelles under the wing. Further work on the design demonstrated that the swing-wing configuration led to unacceptable weight gain, and so Boeing engineers came up with a new design, the "2707-300", that had fixed wings.

However, the America of the late 1960s was characterized by social upheaval that involved questioning the need to come up with something bigger and better, as well as much increased concerns over the environment. Critics were massing against the SST, voicing worries about its sonic booms and the possible effects of its high-altitude cruise on the ozone layer.

The US Congress finally zeroed funds for the program on 24 March 1971 after the expenditure of about a billion USD on the project. There were 121 orders on the books for the aircraft when it was cancelled. SST advocates were dismayed, but the decision to kill the aircraft would prove correct.

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[2] AEROSPATIALE-BAC CONCORDE

* As mentioned, the British and French were actually ahead of the US on SST plans. In 1955, the British aviation industry and British government agencies had consultations on the notion of an SST, leading to the formation of the "Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee (STAC)" in 1956. STAC conducted a series of design studies, leading to leading to the Bristol company's "Bristol 198", which was a slim, delta-winged machine with eight turbojet engines designed to cross the Atlantic at Mach 2. This evolved into the somewhat less ambitious "Bristol 223", which had four engines and 110 seats.

In the meantime, the French had been conducting roughly similar studies, with Sud-Aviation of France coming up with a design surprisingly similar to the Bristol 223, named the "Super Caravelle" after the innovative Caravelle twinjet airliner developed by Sud-Aviation in the 1950s. Given the similarity in the designs and the high cost of developing an SST, British and French government and industry officials began talks to see if the two nations could join hands for the effort.

After extensive discussions, on 29 November 1962, the British and French governments signed a collaborative agreement to develop an Anglo-French SST, which became the "Concorde". It was to be built by the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), which Bristol had become after mergers, and Rolls-Royce in the UK; and Sud-Aviation and the SNECMA engine firm in France.

The initial contract specified the construction of two flight prototypes, two static-test prototypes, and two preproduction aircraft. BAC was responsible for development and production of:

Sud-Aviation was responsible for development and production of:

Design of the automatic flight control system was subcontracted by Aerospatiale to Marconi, now GEC-Marconi, in Britain and SFENA (now Sextant Avionique) in France. Final assembly of British Concordes was at Filton and of French Concordes was at Toulouse.

Prototype construction began in February 1965. The initial flight of the "001" prototype took place from Toulouse on 2 March 1969, while the first flight of the "002" prototype took place from Filton on 9 April 1969. Flight trials showed the design to be sound, though of course there were a few bugs to be worked out. The first preproduction machine, "101", performed its initial flight from Toulouse on 17 December 1971, followed by the second, "102", which performed its initial flight from Filton on 10 January 1973.

The first French production aircraft, "201", performed its initial flight from Toulouse on 6 December 1973, by which time Sud-Aviation had been absorbed into Aerospatiale. The first British production machine, "202", performed its initial flight from Filton on 13 February 1974, both machines well exceeding Mach 1 on their first flight. These two production machines were used for flight test and never entered commercial service. 14 more production machines were built, the last performing its initial flight on 20 April 1979, with seven Concordes going into service with British Airways and seven into service with Air France.

The Concorde received French certification for passenger operations on 13 October 1975, followed by British certification on 5 December 1975. Both British Airways and Air France began commercial flights on 21 January 1976. The initial routes were London to Bahrain, and Paris to Rio de Janiero via Dakar. Service to Washington DC began in May 1976, followed by flights to New York in December 1977. Other routes were added later, and there were also large numbers of charter flights, conducted mostly by British Airways.

The manufacturers had obtained orders for 78 Concordes, but by the time the aircraft was ready to enter service interest had evaporated. Although some of the controversy that had dogged the American SST effort had crossed the ocean, the worst problem was that the 1970s were characterized by rising fuel prices that rendered the thirsty SST uneconomical to operate. The Americans had been sensible to kill off the Boeing 2707-300. Even if the environmental threat of the machine had been exaggerated, the 2707-300 would have never paid itself off.

* The Concorde was a long, dartlike machine with a low-mounted delta wing and four Orpheus afterburning turbojets, with two mounted in a pod under each wing. It was mostly made of aircraft aluminum alloys, with some steel assemblies, as well as some selective high-temperature elements fabricated from Iconel nickel alloy. It was designed for a cruise speed of Mach 2.2. Higher speeds would have required much more extensive use of titanium and other high-temperature materials.

Each of the four Rolls-Royce / SNECMA Olympus 593 Mark 10 engines was rated at 169.3 kN (17,255 kgp / 38,050 lbf) thrust with 17% afterburning. The engines featured thrust reversers. The Olympus had been originally developed in a non-afterburning form to the Avro Vulcan bomber, and a Vulcan had been used in trials of the Concorde engines. The Concorde used afterburner to get off the ground and up to operating speed and altitude, and then cruised at Mach 2 on dry (non-afterburning) thrust. It was one of the first aircraft to actually cruise continuously at supersonic speeds. Interestingly, at subsonic speeds the aircraft was inefficient, requiring high engine power that drained the fuel tanks rapidly.

The Concorde's engine inlets featured variable ramps and electrical deicing. Total fuel capacity was 119,786 liters (26,350 Imperial gallons / 31,645 US gallons), with four tanks in the fuselage and five in each wing. Fuel trim was maintained by an automatic system that shuttled fuel between two trim tanks in the front of the fuselage and one in the rear of the fuselage to maintain the proper center of gravity in different flight operation phases.

The wing had a chord (ratio of cross-sectional height to width) of 3% at the wing root, and featured six hydraulically-operated elevon control surfaces on each wing, organized in pairs. The tailfin featured a two-section rudder. The Concorde had tricycle landing gear, with a twin-wheel steerable nosewheel retracting forward and four-wheel bogies in a 2-by-2 arrangement retracting inward. The landing gear featured carbon disk brakes and an antiskid system. There was a retractable tail bumper wheel to protect the rear of the aircraft on takeoff and landing.

The pilot and copilot sat side-by-side, with a flight engineer behind on the right and provision for a fourth seat. The crew flew the aircraft with an automatic flight control system, guiding their flight with an inertial navigation system backed up by radio navigation systems. Avionics also included a suite of radios as well as a flight data recorder.

The nose was drooped hydraulically to improve the forward view during takeoff and landing, and a retractable transparent visor covered the forward windscreen during supersonic cruise flight. There were short "strake" flight surfaces beneath the cockpit, just behind the drooping nose, apparently to help ensure airflow over the vertical tailfin when the aircraft was flying at high angles of attack.

Maximum capacity was in principle 144 passengers with a high-density seating layout, but in practice seating was not more than 128 and usually more like 100. Of course all accommodations were pressurized and climate-controlled, and the soundproofing was excellent, resulting in a smooth and quiet ride. There were toilets at the front and middle of the fuselage, and galleys front and back. Customer service on the flights placed substantial demands on the stewards and stewardesses because the flights never lasted more than a few hours.

The two prototypes had been slightly shorter and had been fitted with less powerful Olympus engines. 

   AEROSPATIALE-BAC CONCORDE:
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________
 
   spec                    metric              english
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________

   wingspan                25.56 meters        83 feet 10 inches
   wing area               385.25 sq_meters    3,856 sq_feet   
   length                  62.10 meters        203 feet 9 inches
   height                  11.40 meters        37 feet 5 inches

   empty weight            78,700 kilograms    173,500 pounds
   MTO weight              185,065 kilograms   408,000 pounds

   max cruise speed        2,180 KPH           1,345 MPH / 1,175 KT
   service ceiling         18,300 meters       60,000 feet
   range                   6,580 kilometers    4,090 MI / 3,550 NMI
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________
* On 25 July 2000, an Air France Concorde was departing from the Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris when one of its tires hit a piece of metal lying on the runway. The tire disintegrated and a piece of rubber spun off and hit the aircraft, setting up a shockwave that ruptured a fuel tank. The airliner went down in flames and crashed near the town of Gonesse, killing all 109 people aboard and four people who had the bad luck to be in the impact area. All 12 surviving Concordes were immediately grounded pending an investigation.

Safety modifications were made to all seven British Airways and all five surviving Air France Concordes. The bottom of the fuel tanks, except those in the wing outboard of the engines, was fitted with flexible Kevlar-rubber liners to provide them with a limited "self sealing" capability; minor safety modifications were made to some electrical systems; and new "no blowout" tires developed by Michelin were fitted. British Airways also implemented a previously planned update program to fit their seven aircraft with new passenger accommodations.

The Concorde returned to flight status on 7 November 2001, but it was a hollow triumph. The economics of even operating the Concorde, let alone developing it, were marginal, and with the economic slump of the early 21st century both Air France and BOAC were losing money on Concorde flights. In the spring of 2003, Air France announced that they would cease Concorde operations as of 31 May 2003, while British Airways would cease flights as of 31 October 2003. The announcement led to unprecedented levels of passenger bookings for the final flights.

Air France's most worked aircraft, named the "Fox Alpha", had performed 5,845 flights and accumulated 17,723 flight hours. One Air France technical manager claimed that the British and French Concorde fleets had accumulated more supersonic time than all the military aircraft ever built. That may be an exaggeration -- how anyone could compile and validate such a statistic is a good question -- but it does illustrate the unique capabilities of the aircraft. Interestingly, spares were never a problem, despite the age and small numbers of Concordes, as large inventories of parts had been stockpiled for the machines.

It was a sign of the Concorde's mystique that the aircraft were in great demand as museum pieces. Air France CEO Jean-Cyril Spinetta said: "We had more requests for donations than we have aircraft." One ended up on display at the Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris, while another found a home at the US National Air & Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC.

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[3] TUPOLEV TU-144

* Of course, during the 1960s the Soviets and the West were in competition, and anything spectacular the West wanted to do, the Soviets wanted to do as well. That included an SST.

The Soviet Tupolev design bureau developed the USSR's answer to the Concorde, the Tupolev "Tu-144", also known by the NATO codename "Charger". The Tu-144 prototype performed its first flight on 31 December 1968, with test pilot Eduard Elyan at the controls, beating the Concorde by three months. 17 Tu-144s were built, the last one coming off the production line in 1981. This sum includes one prototype, two "Tu-144C" preproduction aircraft, and 14 full production machines, including nine initial-production "Tu-144S" aircraft and five final production "Tu-144Ds" with improved engines.

* The Tu-144 got off to a terrible start, the second Tu-144C preproduction machine breaking up in midair during a demonstration at the Paris Air Show on 9 June 1973 and the debris falling into the village of Goussainville. All six crew in the aircraft and eight French citizens on the ground were killed. 15 houses were destroyed and 60 people were injured. As the initial reaction of the crowd watching the accident was that hundreds of people were likely to have been killed, there was some small relief that the casualties were relatively light. The entire ghastly accident was captured on film.

The details of the incident remain murky. The Concorde had put on a flight display just before the takeoff of the Tu-144, and a French air force Dassault Mirage fighter was in the air, observing the two aircraft. The Concorde crew had been alerted that the fighter was in the area but the Tu-144 crew had not. The speculation is that Elyan, who was piloting the Tu-144, saw the Mirage shadowing him. Although the Mirage was keeping a safe distance, the pilot of the Tu-144 might have been surprise and nosed the Tu-144 down sharply to avoid a collision. Whatever the reason for the nosedive, it flamed out all of the engines. He put the aircraft into a dive so he could get a relight, and overstressed the airframe when he tried to pull out.

This scenario remains speculation. Other scenarios suggest that Elyan was trying too hard to outperform the Concorde and took the machine out of its envelope. After a year's investigation, the French and Soviet governments issued a brief statement saying that the cause of the accident could not be determined. Some suspect a cover-up, but it is impossible to make a sensible judgement given the muddy trail, particularly since the people who could have told exactly what had happened didn't survive to provide explanations.

* The Tu-144 resembled the Concorde, sometimes being called the "Concordski", and there were accusations that it was a copy. Many Western observers pointed out that there were also similarities between the Concorde and many of the American SST proposals, and there was no reason to believe the resemblance between the Concorde and the Tu-144 were much more than a matter of the normal influence of published design concepts on organizations, as well as "convergent evolution", or the simple fact that two machines designed separately to do the same task may out of simple necessity look alike.

The truth was much muddier. Building an SST was an enormous design challenge for the Soviet Union. As a matter of national prestige, it had to be done, with the Soviet aircraft flying first, and as the USSR was behind the West's learning curve, the logical thing to do was steal. An organization was established to collect and analyze open-source material on SSTs from the West, and Soviet intelligence targeted the Concorde effort for penetration.

In 1964, French counterintelligence got wise to this game and sent out an alert to relevant organizations to beware of snoops and to be careful about releases of information. They began to keep tabs on Sergei Pavlov, the head of the Paris office of Aeroflot, whose official job gave him legitimate reasons for obtaining information from the French aviation industry and put him in an excellent position to spy on the Concorde effort.

Pavlov was not aware that French counterintelligence was on to him, and so the French fed him misinformation to send Soviet research efforts down dead ends. Eventually, on 1 February 1965, the French arrested him while he was going to a lunch date with a contact, and found that he had plans for the Concorde's landing gear in his briefcase. Pavlov was thrown out of the country.

However, the Soviets had another agent, Sergei Fabiew, collecting intelligence on the Concorde effort, and French counterintelligence knew nothing about him. His cover was finally blown in 1977 by a Soviet defector, leading to Fabiew's arrest. Fabiew had been highly productive up to that time. In the documents they seized from him, they found a congratulations from Moscow for providing a complete set of Concorde blueprints.

* Although the Soviets did obtain considerable useful intelligence on the Concorde, they were traditionally willing to use their own ideas if that seemed best, and use stolen ideas if that seemed best. They could make good use of fundamental research obtained from the Concorde program to avoid dead ends and get a leg up, and they could leverage designs of Concorde subsystems to cut the time needed to build subsystems for the Tu-144.

In other words, the Tu-144 was still by no means a straight copy of the Concorde. The general configuration of the two aircraft was similar, both being dartlike delta-type aircraft with four afterburning engines paired in two nacelles, with a drooping nose to permit better view on takeoff and landing, and a flight crew of three. Both were mostly built of conventional aircraft alloys. However, there were many differences in detail:

The Tu-144 was powered by four Kuznetsov NK-144 afterburning turbofans with 196.2 kN (20,000 kgp / 44,100 lbf) max afterburning thrust. The engines had separate ducts in each nacelle and variable ramps in the inlets. The Tu-144D, which performed its first flight in 1978, was fitted with Kolesov RD-36-51 engines that featured much improved fuel economy and apparently uprated thrust. Production machines seem to have had thrust reversers, but some sources claim early machines used drag parachutes instead. 

   TUPOLEV TU-144:
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________
 
   spec                    metric              english
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________

   wingspan                28.80 meters        94 feet 6 inches
   wing area               438.00 sq_meters    4,715 sq_feet   
   length                  65.70 meters        215 feet 6 inches
   height                  12.85 meters        42 feet 2 inches

   empty weight            85,000 kilograms    187,395 pounds
   MTO weight              180,000 kilograms   396,830 pounds

   max cruise speed        2,500 KPH           1,555 MPH / 1,350 KT
   service ceiling         18,300 meters       60,000 feet
   range                   6,500 kilometers    4,040 MI / 3,515 NMI
   _____________________   _________________   _______________________
The Tu-144 prototype was a bit shorter and had ejection seats, though production aircraft did not, and also lacked the retractable canards. The engines fitted to the prototypes had a lower thrust rating and were fitted into a single engine box, not a split box as in the production machines. Pictures of the preproduction machines show them to have had a production configuration, though no doubt they differed in details.

* The Tu-144 was not put into service until 26 December 1976, and then only for cargo and mail transport by Aeroflot between Moscow and Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, as an operational evaluation experiment. The Tu-144 didn't begin passenger service until 1 November 1977, and then apparently it was a cramped and uncomfortably noisy ride. Operating costs were unsurprisingly high and apparently the aircraft's reliability left something to be desired, which would not be surprising given its "bleeding edge" nature.

The next year, on 23 May 1978, the first Tu-144D caught fire, had to perform an emergency landing, and was destroyed with some fatalities. The program never recovered. The Tu-144 only performed a total of 102 passenger-carrying flights. Some flight research was performed on two of the aircraft up to 1990, when the Tu-144 was finally grounded.

That was not quite the end of the story. As discussed in the next section, even though the Concorde and Tu-144 were clearly not money-making propositions, interest in building improved SSTs lingered on through the 1980s and 1990s. The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) conducted studies on such aircraft, and in June 1993 officials the Tupolev organization met with NASA officials at the Paris Air Show to discuss pulling one of the Tu-144s out of mothballs to be used as an experimental platform for improved SST design. The meeting had been arranged by British intermediaries.

In October 1993, the Russians and Americans announced that they would conduct a joint advanced SST research effort. The program was formalized in an agreement signed by American Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin at Vancouver, Canada, in June 1994. This agreement also formalized NASA flights with the Russian Mir space station.

The final production Tu-144D was selected for the tests, as it had only 83 flight hours when it was mothballed. Tupolev performed a major refurbishment on it, providing new uprated engines; strengthening the wing to handle the new engines; updating the fuel, hydraulic, electrical, and avionics systems; and adding about 500 sensors feeding a French-designed digital data-acquisition system. The modified Tu-144D was redesignated the "Tu-144LL", where "LL" stood for "Letnoya Laboritoya (Flying Laboratory)".

The new engines were Kuznetsov NK-321 turbofans, used on the huge Tupolev Tu-160 "Blackjack" bomber, replacing the Tu-144's Kolesov RD-36 engines. The NK-321 provides about 20% more power than the RD-36-51 and still better fuel economy. Each NK-321 has a max dry thrust of 137.3 kN (14,000 kgp / 31,000 lbf) and an afterburning thrust of 245.2 kN (25,000 kgp / 55,000 pounds). The details of the NK-321s remain secret, and the Western partners in the venture are not allowed to inspect them.

A sequence of about 26 test flights were conducted in Russia with officials from the NASA Langley center at the Zhukovsky Flight Test Center from 1996 into 1999. Two NASA pilots, including NASA space shuttle pilot C. Gordon Fullerton, flew the machine during the course of the trials. As also discussed in the next section, the whole exercise came to nothing, but it was at least nice to get the machine back in the air one last time.

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[4] FUTURE SSTS?

* Although the US had given up on the Boeing 2707-300 in 1971, NASA continued to conduct paper studies, and in 1985 US President Ronald Reagan announced that the US was going to develop a high-speed transport named the "Orient Express". The announcement was a bit muddled because it confused an attempt to develop a hypersonic spaceplane, which emerged as the dead-end "National Aerospace Plane (NASP)", with NASA studies for an improved SST.

By the early 1990s, NASA's efforts had emerged as the "High Speed Research (HSR)" effort, a collaboration with US aircraft industries to develop a "High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT)" that would carry up to 300 passengers at speeds from Mach 2 to 3 over the distance of 10,500 kilometers (6,500 miles) with a ticket price only 20% more than that of a conventional subsonic airliner. The fact that an SST could move more people in a shorter period of time was seen as a possible economic advantage. The NASA studies focused heavily on finding solutions to the concerns over high-altitude air pollution, airport community noise levels, and sonic boom that had killed the 2707-300.

Other nations also conducted SST studies during the 1990s, and there was an interest in international collaborative development efforts. The biggest non-environmental obstacle was simple development cost. While it might have been possible to develop an SST with reasonable operating costs, given the high development costs it was difficult to see how such a machine could be offered at a competitive price and achieve the sales volumes needed to make it worthwhile to build.

Some aerospace firms took a different approach on the matter, proposing small "supersonic business jets (SSBJs)". The idea was that there was a small market of people for whom time is money and who would be willing to pay a high premium to shave a few hours for a trip across the ocean. Firms such as Dassault in France, Gulfstream in the US, and Sukhoi in Russia came up with paper designs, but that was as far as it went. As with the SST, it might be possible to build an SSBJ that had sensible operating costs, but it was hard to figure out how to deal with the development costs.

* Although the NASA HSR program did put the Tu-144LL back in the air, the study was finally axed in 1999. NASA, in good bureaucratic form, kept the program's cancellation very quiet, in contrast to the grand press releases that had accompanied the effort. This was understandable since NASA has to be wary of politicians out to grab headlines by publicly attacking government boondoggles, but in a sense the agency had nothing to hide. NASA studied the matter front to back, and one official stated off the record that in the end nobody could figure out how to make any money on an SST. From an engineering point of view, a conclusive negative answer is as useful as a conclusive positive answer. However, few politicians have an engineering background and understand such things.

In any case, the cancellation of the HSR program would seem to be a nail in the SST's coffin. The economic slump that followed the turn of the century, which hit the airlines particularly hard, was clearly another nail in the coffin. The SST is such a technologically sexy idea that it may well rise again from the dead, but unless the basic rules of the game change in some dramatic way it wouldn't seem to be a good bet that anyone will fly on an SST again for the forseeable future.

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[5] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

* The SST was one of those ideas that sounded impressive at the time but which suffered from a certain lack of realism. While the Concorde was a lovely, magnificent machine and a technological marvel even when it was retired, it was also a testimony to a certain naivete that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, when people thought that technology could accomplish anything and set out on incredibly grand projects, some of which they incredibly pulled off, and some of which turned out very differently than envisioned. At the same time, however, it's hard not to admire their dash.

There's still a certain perverse humor to the whole thing. The French and the British actually built the Concorde, and it was an elegant affair. The Americans, in typical grand style, cooked up a plan to build a machine that was twice as big and faster -- and never got it off the ground. The irony was that Americans made the right decision when they killed the 2707-300. The further irony was that they did for environmental reasons that were, if not necessarily wrong, at least far less relevant than the simple bad economics of the whole idea.

* Sources include:

The information on the Soviet effort to penetrate the Concorde program was obtained from "Supersonic Spies", an episode of the US Public Broadcasting System's NOVA TV program, released in early 1998. NASA's website also provided some useful details on the Tu-144LL test program and the Tu-144 in general, as did the surprisingly good Russian Monino aviation museum website.

* Revision history: 

   v1.0.0 / 01 aug 03 / gvg
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