 If you've already downloaded the Air France Concorde available for download on fsaerospace.com here, please try this great Tupolev TU-144 SST (supersonic transport) aircraft. You'll note that this model is significantly more difficult to fly than a Cessna - but hey, have you ever broken the speed barrier in your trusty 172? Probably not. This model adapted for FS X by Eric Buchmann has very nice moving parts including afterburners, moving nose and winglet parts and great miscellaneous other effects. The Tupolev Tu-144 (NATO reporting name: Charger) was the first supersonic transport aircraft (SST), constructed under the direction of the Soviet Tupolev design bureau headed by Alexei Tupolev (1925 – 2001). Western observers nicknamed the plane Concordski (sometimes Konkordski), sounding Russian yet still very close to the Concorde (again, downloadable from fsaerospace.com), to which the Tu-144 was visually similar. A prototype first flew on December 31, 1968, near Moscow, two months before Concorde. The Tu-144 first broke the sound barrier on June 5, 1969, and on July 15, 1969, it became the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2, and the fastest commercial airliner ever.  Along with early Tu-134s, the Tu-144 was one of the last commercial airplanes with a braking parachute. The last two production aircraft remain at the Tupolev production plant in Zhukovsky, reg 77114 and 77115. In March 2006, it was announced that these airframes had been sold for scrap. Later that year, however, it was reported that both aircraft would instead be preserved. Currently, both aircraft are located on the open air parkings at LII aircraft testing facility, Zhukovsky. They are constantly used on MAKS Airshows. The only Tu-144 on display outside the former Soviet Union was acquired by the Auto & Technikmuseum Sinsheim in Germany, where it was shipped — not flown — in 2001 and where it now stands, in its original Aeroflot livery, on display next to an Air France Concorde.
[Version: fsx]
Author: Eric Buchmann | Size: 7.5MB | Added: 2008-05-11 | Downloaded 17982 times
|
