Tupolev

Tupolev, Russian aerospace design bureau that is a major producer of civilian passenger airliners and military bombers. As a Soviet agency, it developed the U.S.S.R.’s first commercial jetliner and the world’s first supersonic passenger jet. Headquarters are in Moscow.

Tupolev consists of the main design bureau and an experimental plant in Moscow, a branch in Tomilino, a flight-testing station in Zhukovsky, several design affiliates throughout Russia, and a department in Ukraine. It employs about 10,000 people. Since its establishment it has been involved in about 80 aircraft projects, almost half of which have been put into massive series production, and it has supplied more than 50 percent of all passenger aircraft operated by the countries of the former Soviet Union. In addition to civilian passenger airliners, Tupolev produces freight aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and test aircraft for research and development projects. Its success in foreign markets has been small compared with other Russian airplane builders.

The origin of the company dates to September 1922 with the formation of a commission to design and develop all-metal military aircraft. Established as part of the Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute (TsAGI), the premiere Soviet aeronautics research institution, the commission was headed by aviation designer and TsAGI co-founder Andrey N. Tupolev. Tupolev’s organization, which was set up in Moscow, included both a design team and workshop facilities to construct experimental aircraft for testing. The group’s early forays into aircraft design led to the creation of a number of notable Soviet airplanes including the TB-1 (ANT-4), the world’s first all-metal, twin-engine, cantilever-wing bomber and one of the largest planes built in the 1920s. Two Tupolev aircraft from the early 1930s, the giant, eight-engine ANT-20 airliner (Maksim Gorky) and the ANT-25 bomber, set world records for size and long-distance flights, respectively. In July 1936 Tupolev’s design and construction effort was formally separated from the TsAGI and reorganized as Plant 156; its staff at that time numbered more than 4,000.

In October 1937, during the height of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s great purges, the state secret police arrested and imprisoned Tupolev and a number of associates on charges of sabotage and espionage. Late the following year, the secret police organized the TsKB-29 (Central Design Bureau 29) in the Bolshevo prison near Moscow to allow incarcerated aviation designers to develop military aircraft. There they ordered Tupolev to organize a design team, which, despite the lack of proper facilities for design and testing, managed to build a full-size mock up of a bomber design from timber. Eventually the team was allowed to return to the Plant 156 facilities in Moscow. Still prisoners and under constant guard, they designed and built a new twin-engine tactical bomber, the Tu-2, which was rolled out in late 1940 and which became the standard tactical bomber in the Soviet air force in the immediate post-World War II era. In July 1941 Tupolev and a number of colleagues were released from incarceration, just in time to assist in evacuating their design bureau to Omsk in western Siberia following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. By the time the group returned to its former facilities in Moscow in late 1943, Tupolev had reestablished it as OKB-156 (Experimental Design Bureau 156).

The first major postwar task for Tupolev’s bureau was to produce an exact replica of the Boeing B-29 bomber, based on a complete breakdown and detailed analysis of American planes that had been impounded during the war. The product of this effort was the Tu-4, the first truly strategic Soviet bomber. Tupolev simultaneously converted the Tu-4 for civilian use as the Tu-70, setting a precedent that he would later follow for several other military aircraft. In the 1950s, the design bureau produced the swept-wing turboprop Tu-95 in response to Stalin’s request to develop an intercontinental strategic heavy bomber. Known to NATO allies by the designation “Bear,” the Tu-95 became one of the longest-lived aircraft in the Soviet strategic arsenal. In the same period it created the first Soviet jet airliner, the twin-engine Tu-104, which first flew in 1955. The Tu-104 was derived from the bureau’s highly successful Tu-16 jet bomber, first flown in 1952. From the late 1950s through the early ’80s, the design bureau introduced a new generation of supersonic jet bombers, which included the twin-engine Tu-22, the twin-engine, variable-wing Tu-22M (Tu-26; NATO designation “Backfire”), and the four-engine, variable-wing Tu-160 (“Blackjack”). These were in addition to its development of several civilian airliners, such as the four-turboprop, 220-passenger Tu-114 (the world’s largest passenger plane until the Boeing 747) and the 160-passenger Tu-154 trijet.

During the 1960s the bureau also undertook the design and construction of a delta-wing supersonic transport, the Tu-144, a counterpart to the British and French Concorde. Tupolev assigned his son, Aleksey, as chief designer for the project. In June 1969 the Tu-144 became the first passenger jet to fly faster than the speed of sound. The aircraft’s fuel consumption, however, proved to be much higher than anticipated, shortening its range, and political support for it waned after a production plane crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973. The Tu-144 was in passenger service only briefly in 1977–78, until a second aircraft caught fire and crashed while on a test flight. In 1996 the design bureau revived the Tu-144 as part of a cooperative project with a number of U.S. aerospace companies to conduct research on a test version of a supersonic airliner.

Aleksey succeeded his father as general designer of the bureau upon the latter’s death in 1972. In 1989 the organization became known by the name ANTK imeni A.N. Tupoleva (Aviation Scientific and Technical Complex named after A.N. Tupolev) as part of a restructuring to unite the core design bureau with its production affiliates. In 1992, following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., it became a joint stock company with the Russian government holding a limited financial interest.

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In the 1990s Tupolev struggled to survive in an extremely strained economy. Its few viable projects involved passenger airliners such as the Tu-204, which went into service in 1996. It also developed the Tu-324 passenger airliner, its first aircraft supported solely by financing from a commercial customer, the republic of Tatarstan. Other new products included the Tu-334, a 100-passenger airliner designed to replace its Tu-134 (introduced in the 1960s), and the Tu-330, a wide-body cargo transport for the Russian air force. It also continued to make marginal upgrades in the systems of its older bomber fleets.