Tupolev Tu-114

The Tu-114 was born of a government order. In August 1955 the USSR Council of Ministers directed the Tupolev design bureau to produce a long-range airliner with a range of 8,000 km, derived from the Tu-95 strategic bomber and powered by the same four Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprops driving contra-rotating propellers. Within the bureau the project was known as "aircraft 114" and initially carried the designation Tu-95P; N. I. Bazenkov was appointed chief designer. The approach was pragmatic: keep the bomber's wing, tail, main undercarriage and powerplant and mate them to an entirely new pressurised fuselage of much greater diameter. The wing, mid-mounted on the Tu-95, was moved to the low position, which demanded a new and far taller nose leg (around 3 m) to give clearance to the 5.6 m propellers; flap chord was increased to cope with the extra weight.

The prototype, registered CCCP-L5611 and named "Rossiya", first flew on 15 November 1957 with test pilot A. P. Yakimov at the controls, barely two years after the programme began. At 54.1 m long and with a 51.1 m span it was, and remained until the late 1960s, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, and its wing swept at 35 degrees, the same angle as the Boeing 707, let it fly at jet-like speeds: about 880 km/h maximum and a cruise equivalent to Mach 0.71, still well below the Mach 0.83 typical of the 707, DC-8 or VC10. The initial production version described here is the baseline from which every other variant derives.

The fuselage had two decks joined by a staircase. The lower deck held two baggage holds, a crew rest area and the galley, connected to the cabin by a dumbwaiter; a chef was originally part of the crew. The upper deck offered three cabins and four sleeping compartments: 41 seats in the forward cabin, 48 places in the second (arranged face to face around tables, over the wing and therefore in the noisiest part of the aircraft; on official flights it served as a restaurant), four compartments with three berths each, and 54 seats in the rear cabin. In this "native" layout the aircraft carried 170 passengers, although a high-density configuration could take up to 224. Unusual touches included separate men's and women's lavatories in the tail and baby bassinets near row 16. This dual purpose, airline service and state transport, explains the luxury of the berths, which on international flights were sold as first class.

The Tu-114 was first shown to the West at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition and became famous in September 1959, when the prototype itself carried Nikita Khrushchev to the United States on the first visit by a Soviet leader to that country. The aircraft was still under test and its first long-range flight, only four months earlier, had left hairline cracks in the engines; the Central Committee, Defence Minister Malinovsky and the premier's personal pilot all thought it too risky, but Khrushchev insisted and Andrei Tupolev put his son Alexei on the same flight as a token of confidence, with a team of engineers monitoring the engines throughout the crossing. On arrival at Andrews Air Force Base no passenger steps were tall enough for the door and the delegation had to climb down the aircraft's own emergency ladder; the same happened later at London and Paris.

Scheduled Aeroflot service began on 24 April 1961 on the Moscow-Vnukovo to Khabarovsk route, and over the following years the type opened the airline's international network to Copenhagen, Havana, Montreal, New Delhi, Paris, Belgrade and Tokyo, the last in cooperation with Japan Air Lines. The January 1967 OAG listed a weekly Sheremetyevo to Montreal service scheduled at 11 h 50 min, two weekly flights to Havana at 19 h 20 min and one to Delhi at 7 h. As the Il-62 jet took over those routes, Delhi and Montreal in 1967, Tokyo and Havana in 1969, the Tu-114s were moved to long domestic sectors from Domodedovo to Alma-Ata, Tashkent, Novosibirsk and Khabarovsk, plus charter flights for senior officials and state delegations.

In March and April 1960 the second pre-production aircraft, CCCP-76459, flown by Ivan Sukhomlin's crew, set a series of FAI world records in the turboprop class, among them 871.38 km/h over a 1,000 km closed circuit with payloads of up to 25,000 kg; in all the type claimed 32 records and still holds the title of fastest propeller-driven aircraft. Passengers paid the price for that performance: 108 to 112 dB of propeller noise and vibration, and flexible fuel bladders typical of a 1955 design that the Russian source lists among the type's weaknesses. The only fatal accident of its career was Aeroflot Flight 065 on 17 February 1966: CCCP-76491 attempted a night take-off at Sheremetyevo with snow not cleared across the full width of the runway, struck a snow bank with its wing and the propellers of engines 3 and 4 hit the runway; the aircraft veered off and caught fire, with 21 of the 66 people on board killed according to later reports.

Plant No. 18 at Kuibyshev (now Samara) built 32 production aircraft between 1961 and 1965 in addition to the prototype. The last two left the factory with updated flight and navigation equipment that was later fitted across the fleet. Fatigue life was set at 14,000 flying hours and most airframes passed that mark in 1976; with cracks in the structural panels of the engine mountings and the Il-62 established for a decade, Aeroflot saw no point in repairs. CCCP-76485 closed commercial operations on 2 December 1976 with a Domodedovo to Khabarovsk and back rotation, and in the summer of 1977 21 aircraft were scrapped at once. A handful flew on with the Soviet Air Force; the English source extends their use to 1991, the Russian one to the early 1980s. In fifteen years the type had carried more than six million passengers while burning 5,000 to 5,500 kg of fuel per hour in cruise, comparable to a modern wide-body twin.

No Tu-114 remains airworthy. Three survive: the prototype CCCP-L5611, Khrushchev's aircraft, at the Central Air Force Museum in Monino; CCCP-76490 (construction number 64M471) at the civil aviation museum in Ulyanovsk, alongside the sole surviving Tu-116; and CCCP-76485 (63M461), the aircraft of the last commercial flight, at the aviation college museum in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Two more were lost as monuments: CCCP-76464, displayed at the entrance to Domodedovo from 1976, was destroyed by the airport's owner on 2 August 2006, and CCCP-76470, used as a civil-defence classroom at the Vnukovo repair plant, was cut up the same summer.