Tupolev Tu-104
The Tupolev Tu-104, known to NATO as the Camel, was the Soviet Union's first jet airliner and the second jetliner to enter regular service anywhere, after the de Havilland Comet. Adapted from the Tu-16 bomber, it first flew in 1955 and entered Aeroflot service in September 1956; with the Comet grounded, it was the world's only operating jetliner until 1958. Tupolev built 201 of them between 1956 and 1960, and Aeroflot carried more than 90 million passengers on the type. ČSA of Czechoslovakia was the only export customer. The Tu-104 had a poor safety record by Western standards and left civilian service in 1979; military aircraft flew on until 1981.
Why It Mattered
The Tu-104 was the Soviet Union's first jet airliner, and only the second jet airliner in the world to enter regular service, following Britain's de Havilland Comet. When the Comet fleet was grounded over safety concerns, the Soviet type was left as the only jetliner carrying passengers anywhere, a position it held from 1956 until 1958. Vintage Aviation News credits the type with helping to usher in the Jet Age, and calls it a significant milestone in Cold War-era aviation history. It achieved this not as a clean-sheet civil design but as an adaptation of a bomber. NATO knew it by the reporting name Camel.
Design Notes
Tupolev built the airliner around its Tu-16 bomber, retaining the bomber's wings, engines and tail surfaces and replacing the fuselage with a wider, pressurised one. Its two Mikulin turbojets were embedded in the wing roots, as on the Tu-16. The first version seated 50 passengers; uprated engines made the Tu-104A a 70-seater, and a stretched fuselage produced the 100-passenger Tu-104B. Because many Soviet airfields had short runways, the aircraft carried a drag parachute to shorten its landing run. It normally flew with a crew of seven. Some Western observers dubbed the cabin "Victorian" for its mahogany, copper and lace fittings.
Operational History
The prototype made its first flight on 17 June 1955. Revenue service began on 15 September 1956, on Aeroflot's Moscow–Omsk–Irkutsk route, where the jet cut the journey from 13 hours 50 minutes to 7 hours 40 minutes. Production ran from 1956 to 1960 in factories at Kharkiv, Kazan and Omsk, and 201 aircraft were built in total. ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines was the only export customer, buying six Tu-104As. In 1957, ČSA's Prague–Moscow service became the first air route flown exclusively with jet airliners. Aeroflot, then the world's largest airline, carried more than 90 million passengers on the type. The type's safety record was poor beside Western jetliners: the Flight Safety Foundation counts 16 Tu-104s lost in crashes between 1958 and 1981, out of 37 written off. Vintage Aviation News notes that whether the causes lay more in the design or in training and maintenance remains a matter of debate. Aeroflot withdrew the Tu-104 from civilian service in March 1979.
Afterlife
Several aircraft passed to the Soviet military, which used them as staff transports and as zero-gravity trainers for cosmonauts. Military flying ended in 1981, when the type was permanently removed from service. The last Tu-104 flight of all was a ferry flight on 11 November 1986, delivering an aircraft to the aviation museum at Ulyanovsk. Individual aircraft survive in museums, among them a former ČSA Tu-104A displayed at Kbely in Prague and the cosmonaut trainer preserved at Monino, near Moscow. The experience Tupolev gained with the type led directly to its next airliners, the smaller Tu-124 and the Tu-134.