TU-144 was a fascinating project. It was mostly about PR — there was no financial need whatsoever for supersonic civil aviation in communist states. But the Kremlin felt they needed to keep up appearances w the technologically advancing west. So they commissioned Tupolev (one of two government owned airplane makers, the other being Ilyushin, though I think they ended up using some Ilyushin people) to create a Concorde competitor to display at the Paris air shows. Recall that the US in that era was also developing a supersonic plane via Boeing’s SST (a taxpayer funded boondoggle program that was eventually scrapped before a plane was ever built). Just as there was a “space race” there was a “supersonic race” between east and west.

The Soviets started w military jet engines and built the wings and airframe using what they knew from civil aviation, their space exploration and quite a bit of corporate espionage from the Concorde program. But the wings proved to especially tricky and they had lots of engineering problems. All done, of course, with woefully behind Soviet tech and manufacturing capabilities (employees in the top secret plant would work in a poorly heated hangar on a cutting-edge supersonic plane during the day, and then return home at night to their old, decrepit shanty houses that lacked indoor plumbing).

What emerged was a shoddy, highly unreliable plane (with a cabin noise level that was reportedly deafening) that famously crashed at Goussainville in 1973. Aeroflot scheduled the plane on a Moscow-Almaty route but it was so unreliable and expensive to operate that it rarely made the trip. The bird was eventually (and quietly) abandoned.