“Ran when parked…”
From the replies on the original tweet, it sounds like that’s not “back yard of a stately Russian mansion,” but rather part of a university. Here it is on Google Street View: http://goo.gl/maps/SOEnW
And here’s the page that appears to be the source of the photo: http://gelio.livejournal.com/198764.html
I’m guessing some kind of engineering school. Notice that hangar-like wing.
http://usvsth3m.com/post/97046771928/this-russian-version-of-concorde-looks-like-it-has-been
Better article. Institute of Aviation in Kazan
Nice big slideshow of this place in Kazan.
As a friend commented "from the country that brought you tetris … note the second plane hiding under that one
Go Team Venture!
…waaaaaaaaant!
You guys wrecked my joke, which was going to be “It’s not hard to tell which house the Russian mafia lives in, is it?”
I read “supersonic jet” and think of a small jetfighter. But this is a 140-seat passenger jet, the size of the concorde …
Sorry to burst the fun, but the building isn’t some oligarch’s mansion. Wikimapia has it labelled as “6-е здание КАИ (Казань)”.
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=55.854366&lon=49.098533&z=17&m=b&show=/11718950/ru/6-е-здание-КАИ
That might mean 6th Building of the Kazan National Research Technical University. Best I can do with google translate. I know no Russian.
Via Google Translate “One of the seven surviving legendary TU 144’s. Stands in the courtyard of the 6th building of Kazan State Technical University, the former Kazan Aviation Institute (CAI).”
I was really hoping this was a Russian oligarch / mafioso’s house. It would have been a scene right out of Cryptonomicon
I love Soviet economics:
A flight by such a superfast vehicle was 1,5 times expensive than the one by a regular plane. It means that mankind is not ready to pay high price for fast spatial motion yet.
To be fair, the numbers were similar for Concorde, too. One extra difference was that the 144 had a weird structural/aerodynamic instability at high angles of attack, supposedly. Otherwise they would have flown it? Who knows. The Brezhnev regime was as generally incompetent as the Nixon regime was batshit insane.
Oh yes. A really marginal fare increase over a first class passenger ticket.
I guess they didn’t pay enough attention to the designs they stole.
Two crashes (including the one at the Paris Air Show) kind of did for it. Bizarrely, they apparently used them as cargo aircraft for a while after passenger service ended.
I love that turquoise color the rooshins use on their instrument panels in all their fighter and bombers cockpits. It pleases me.
That’s nothing, the American wing at Duxford in the UK is built to be just big enough to fit a B-52.
They then manage to fit another 19 aircraft around and under it, including an SR-71.
