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On June 17, 1955, exactly 55 years ago, an experimental aircraft "104" developed by the Tupolev Design Bureau took off from the airfield in Zhukovsky near Moscow. Factory tests of the aircraft began, which by the fall of the same year will turn into a Tu-104 jet airliner - the third in the world, the second commissioned and the first in the USSR.

The very theme of "104th" moved from a dead center only after Stalin's death, although proposals for the creation of a jet passenger fleet were repeatedly put forward under him. But the leader, with his inherent parsimony and a penchant for repeated reinsurance, inexorably “hacked” such ideas. The country had just overcome the post-war devastation, and could not afford significant "non-core" spending, and jet passenger aviation in the early 50s was still not a problem of prime necessity for the Soviet national economy.

A joke is widespread among railway students: "Soviet cars are not designed to carry passengers, they are adapted for it." When creating the first Soviet jet liner, the Tupolev Design Bureau used a similar principle, but seriously and competently. The successful Tu-16 bomber was taken as a basis (the plane "104" even at one time bore the Tu-16P index - "passenger") in order to gain resources and time for general development of the structure.

Thus, the task of training flight technical personnel was also facilitated, and they also saved on ground maintenance equipment.

As one of the arguments in favor of creating such an aircraft, A.N. Tupolev cited the possibility of flying at high altitude, “over the weather” - screw passenger aircraft, which had a small ceiling, suffered mercilessly from turbulence. But it was there that the first jet airliner was guarded by a new, as yet unknown danger ...

When it comes to a passenger plane, the first thing that seriously worries potential passengers is reliability. Who in the USSR has not heard the black song: "Tu-104 is the fastest plane: it will take you two minutes to the grave"? For all its offensiveness, it somehow reflected the harsh reality. The plane was made in a hurry. The accident rate of the new car exceeded reasonable - by today's standards - indicators. Over the entire history of operation, 37 cars have suffered serious accidents - 18% of the total number produced. At the same time, it should be noted that the 104th behaved much more decently in flight than its English competitor Comet, the De Havilland company (23% of lost vehicles), which had an unhealthy habit of falling apart in the air due to fatigue loads in a carelessly designed fuselage.

The first Tu-104 aircraft flew at the beginning of November 1955. Thus, it took very little time to develop. During this flight, there were some problems: during the flight, the plane was unexpectedly thrown up, after which control of the machine was lost for some time. The pilots called this condition "catch". It was not possible to determine the reason for this phenomenon. Despite this, the operation of the aircraft was continued, and the tests did not stop.

Khrushchev liked the Tu-104 plane so much that he even decided to fly it to Great Britain in 1956. Since the problems with the plane could not be resolved, he was persuaded to abandon such a flight. But it was necessary to demonstrate to the world the successes of Soviet aircraft construction. Therefore, by order of Khrushchev, the Tu-104 was driven to the British capital.

The arrival of the Soviet airliner, according to the British press, had an effect comparable to the landing of a UFO. The next day, a second copy of the TU-104, with a different number, flew to London. The British newspapers reported that it was one and the same plane, and the "Russian priests" "were repainting the numbers on their experimental plane." "Russian priests" are Russian pilots dressed in all black. Chief Designer A.N. Tupolev was offended, and, firstly, ordered to allocate funds to the pilots to dress in something fashionable and not black, and the next day - March 25, 1956, send three TU-104s to London at once, which was executed.

It was a triumph for the Soviet Union - after all, at that time no other country in the world had operating jet passenger airliners.

The Tu-104 made its first regular flight on September 15, 1956. And in 1958, a black streak began.

As the further development of events showed, the problems with the "pickup" were not resolved. In August 1958, the Tu-104, having lost control, crashed, as a result of which 64 people died. Designer Tupolev denied in every possible way that there were any problems, and the disaster was due to the fault of the crew. There is a version that the plane simply did not have enough fuel. But after a while the second Tu-104 also crashed, entering a tailspin and crashing into the ground.

And two months later - exactly the same situation developed near Kanash.

On October 7, 1958, the new Tu-104A with the tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of the most experienced pilot Harold Kuznetsov, performed the flight Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. The flight altitude was 12 kilometers. In the salon were mainly foreign citizens - a delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists.

The weather in Moscow was bad, and at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after the flight over Kazan, the dispatcher ordered to turn around and go to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "catch" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. Suddenly, the plane was thrown up sharply, and with such force that such a huge colossus flew up two kilometers, left the echelon up, lost speed, fell onto the wing and went into a tailspin.

In the situation that arose, the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft. But the lack of elevator travel prevented the car from being taken out of lethal mode. Harold Kuznetsov, knowing that the Birobidzhan story might be repeating itself, ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground.

The commander of the crew, Harold Kuznetsov, and the co-pilot, Anton Artemyev, tried to level the plane, taking the steering wheel all the way. But it did not help. Then the plane went down sharply, disobeying control. Thus, the plane entered a steep uncontrollable dive. At supersonic speed, almost vertically, the plane was heading towards the ground.

Here the crew accomplished the almost impossible: Commander Harold Kuznetsov, in two minutes of falling from a height of 13 kilometers, managed to transmit the features of the vehicle's behavior by radio. The connection worked almost until the very moment of the collision with the ground. The last words of the commander were: “Goodbye. We are dying. "

The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky region of Chuvashia, a few tens of meters from the Moscow-Kazan-Sverdlovsk railroad, not far from the village of Bulatovo. Killed 65 passengers and 9 crew members.

According to the results of the work of the state commission, the accident lasted no more than two minutes.

The information conveyed by Kuznetsov was of great value, since all previous incidents remained unsolved. None of the investigations carried out by specialists from the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, the Air Force, the State Research Institute, as well as the Tupolev Design Bureau itself, could shed light on what actually happened. Many assumptions were put forward: technical malfunction, defects in design, bad weather conditions, crew errors.

All the bumps, of course, fell on the pilots' heads, since no one doubted the technical characteristics of the aircraft. But the information transmitted by Kuznetsov dotted the "I". From the information received, the commission concluded that the liner was caught in a huge updraft. None of the designers could even imagine that this was possible at an altitude of more than 9 kilometers, since simple piston machines could rise to a much lower height. Therefore, such a phenomenon as turbulence was considered a trifle. Until the tragedy happened ...

Kuznetsov's crew got into the very center of the vertical air flow. Later, in the process of reproducing the flight, the designers managed to determine its parameters: the width of the air flow was about 2 kilometers, the length was about 13, and the thickness was about 6 kilometers. At the same time, its speed was approaching 300 kilometers per hour.

It was urgent to find a way to deal with such a dangerous natural phenomenon. As a result, the maximum flight altitude was lowered, the structure itself was modernized, new methods for centering machines were developed, but still the problem was not completely solved. The high accident rate remained at the same level, but it was difficult to determine what was the reason - either design errors or unavailability of the pilots.

The transmitted information was enough to find and fix the problem. The aircraft centering rules were changed, the stabilizer angle was changed and the elevator was modified. The maximum flight altitude has also been reduced. The propensity of the aircraft to "catch" has been greatly reduced.
After that, the Tu-104 carried passengers for another three decades, and although it was not without disasters (after all, about 200 aircraft were built and flew), their reasons were already different. For a long time, the Tu-104 became the main passenger aircraft of Aeroflot: for example, in 1960, a third of the passenger air traffic in the USSR was carried out on the Tu-104. For 23 years of operation, the Tu-104 fleet has carried about 100 million passengers, having spent 2,000,000 flight hours in the air and performed more than 600,000 flights.

Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeny Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight mechanic
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatiana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant

Unsurprisingly, the plane took on a bad name. In 1960, the Tu-104 liner was discontinued, and its place was temporarily taken by the Il-18 turboprop liners. And since a long runway was needed to accelerate the Tu-104, it was not often used on domestic flights.

The need arose to create new passenger aircraft. Tupolev decided not to retreat from the intended path. As a result, the first modification of the Tu-104, Tu-124, was created, which also had a high accident rate. Therefore, another version was created - Tu-134. This aircraft was more successful, therefore, since the beginning of operation in 1967, it still operates domestic flights. And only in 1972, the first Tu-154 jet airliner appeared, which was not converted from a military vehicle, but was originally designed as a passenger one. This is one of the favorite aircraft of Russian experienced pilots.

Aeroflot removed the last Tu-104s from regular airlines only in 1979. But by that time the aircraft had firmly taken root in military aviation - it was used to train pilots of naval missile carriers, as a flying laboratory, for meteorological research and as a command aircraft. Finally, the flights of the "104" were terminated only at the beginning of 1981, after an overloaded vehicle belonging to the Soviet Navy crashed at a military airfield near Leningrad. It almost completely killed the command staff of the Pacific Fleet - 52 people, including 17 admirals and generals, including the commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Emil Spiridonov, who owned the ill-fated vehicle.

Such a bitter experience forced domestic designers to think over new aerodynamic forms that could withstand air currents.

Officially, the last flight of the Tu-104 took place in November 1986. But some people claim that at the very end of the 80s they saw "104s" on the platforms of regional airports and even in flight. The son of a warrior and the grandfather of Soviet jet airliners did not want to retire, remaining such a kind ghost in an impoverished, but comfortably inhabited castle of Russian civil aviation.