Tupolev Tu-104

In the early 1950s Aeroflot needed to replace its piston fleet with something far faster and more capable. The Tupolev bureau took the most effective shortcut available: starting from the Tu-16 Badger strategic bomber. Wings, engines and tail surfaces carried over almost unchanged to the new aircraft, which received a wider pressurised fuselage designed for fifty passengers. The prototype, built at the MMZ 'Opit' plant, first flew on 17 June 1955; the first production Tu-104 took off on 5 November of the same year. The crew consisted of two pilots, a navigator seated in the glazed bomber nose, a flight engineer and a radio operator, the last later eliminated. The cabin drew attention from Western observers, who called it 'Victorian' because of the mahogany, copper and lace used in it.

On 15 September 1956 the Tu-104 opened revenue service on Aeroflot's Moscow–Omsk–Irkutsk route, replacing the Ilyushin Il-14 and cutting the flight time from thirteen hours and fifty minutes to seven hours and forty minutes. By 1957 the type was flying from Moscow's Vnukovo Airport to London, Budapest, Copenhagen, Beijing, Brussels, Ottawa, Delhi and Prague. That same year Czechoslovak carrier ČSA became the only export customer and, flying the Tu-104A between Prague and Moscow, the first airline in the world to operate a route exclusively with jet airliners. ČSA bought six Tu-104As configured for 81 passengers, four new and two used. In 1959 one aircraft was leased to Britain's Sir Henry Lunn Ltd. to carry holidaymakers to Russia on four-and-a-half-hour flights.

Handling was always the Tu-104's weak point. Pilots trained on the Il-28 bomber and then flew mail sorties in an unarmed Tu-16 painted in Aeroflot colours; those with Tu-16 experience converted with relative ease. The aircraft was heavy on the controls, quite fast on final approach and prone to stalling at low speed. Poor wing aerodynamics produced a violent pitch-up before the stall that could develop into an unrecoverable dive; at least two accidents were attributed to the phenomenon and, despite changes to the design and to operating procedures, it was never fully cured. Fearing inadvertent stalls, crews landed at 270–300 km/h, nearly 50 km/h faster than recommended. Sixteen of ninety-six aircraft were lost in accidents.

Aeroflot retired the Tu-104 from civilian service in March 1979 after a fatal accident at Moscow, though several aircraft passed to the military as staff transports and for training cosmonauts in zero gravity. A military crash in February 1981 that killed 50 people, 17 of them senior army and naval staff, led to the type's permanent removal from service. The last flight was a ferry to the Ulyanovsk Aircraft Museum on 11 November 1986. A total of 201 aircraft were built between 1956 and 1960, and the experience gained led Tupolev to develop the Tu-124, the world's first series-built turbofan airliner, and subsequently the Tu-134.