Tupolev Tu-104 Tu-104

The initial Tu-104 came out of Aeroflot's requirement for a modern airliner with better capacity and performance than the piston aircraft in service at the beginning of the 1950s. The Tupolev OKB based the design on its Tu-16 «Badger» strategic bomber: wings, engines and tail surfaces were retained and mated to a new, wider pressurised fuselage sized for 50 passengers. The prototype, built at MMZ 'Opit', first flew on 17 June 1955 with Yu. L. Alasheyev at the controls, and the first series aircraft took off on 5 November 1955.

The variant was powered by two Mikulin AM-3 turbojets buried in the wing roots — the Tu-16 layout — each rated at 6,735 kgf of thrust. The crew numbered five: two pilots, a navigator in the glazed bomber nose, a flight engineer and a radio operator, the last later eliminated. A drag parachute shortened the landing distance by up to 400 m, since few Soviet airports had long enough runways at the time. The interior, in mahogany, copper and lace, astonished Western observers, who called it «Victorian».

The Tu-104 was considered difficult to fly: heavy on the controls, fast on final approach and prone to stalling at low speed, a trait common to highly swept wings. Crews trained on the Ilyushin Il-28 bomber and then flew mail runs in an unarmed Tu-16 painted in Aeroflot colours between Moscow and Sverdlovsk. Twenty-nine airframes of this first version were built before engine improvements opened the way to the Tu-104A.

Three developments with separate designations grew out of the Tu-104 and are not counted here as variants: the Tu-107, a military transport prototype with a rear loading ramp and a defensive turret with paired cannon, of which a single aircraft was built; the Tu-110, a four-engine export version that flew in March 1957 and was cancelled after a handful of prototypes — though its longer fuselage was reused on the Tu-104B; and the Tu-118, a projected turboprop version with four Kuznetsov TV-2F engines that never left the drawing board.