The break up and crash of the Tu144 at the Paris airshow was attributed to the pilot pulling a large negative G bund over at the top of a climb. Many believe this was due to a French airforce Mirage III reconassance plane that had been sent up to 'spy' on the Tu144 during it's display. The Tu144 pilot was un-aware of the Mirage's presence untill he suddenly saw it, and took violent evasive action. The Flight recorder tapes have never been released to the public, and suspicion is that the French and Russians contrived to hush things up.
Yes, this is true. Neither the French nor the Russians are beyond suspicion when it comes to covering things up, after all!
The best theory I've heard is that the bund was violent enough to flame-out the engines, the pilot then entered a dive and concentrated on getting them restarted before realising that he was in a position where he couldn't pull out of the dive without either overstressing the aircraft or hitting the ground. End result: he did both. 
Having said that, I think the following passage from Wikipedia, if factually correct, probably highlights the most significant differences between the two aircraft:
Whereas Concorde had been subjected to 5,000 hours of testing by the time it was certified for passenger flight, making it the most tested aircraft ever,[42] total flight testing time of the Tu-144 by the time of its introduction into passenger service was less than 800 hours.
Not for the first time, the Russans' priority was to be first, the West's to be safe. 
it was the cold war era where there was a race.. given enough development time it could easily be better.. here is a technical quote ;
"The wing, Concorde had an advanced, highly refined wing design, at the time incorporating new production methods.
The TU-144 has a much simpler wing, a poor performer at low speeds, hence the later addition of canards, with no doubt a big weight penalty.
The early TU-144s had a simply terrible intake layout aerodynamically, improved a bit on later ones, still very draggy however.
Concorde had an advanced (and tough to develop) computerized system to reduce airflow speeds into the engine, by nearly 1000 m.p.h. in 13 feet, by synthesizing air data and converting that into movements of two ramps in the roof on each intake in front of the engine, these cause twin shockwaves slowing the air velocity down to acceptable speeds for the engine compressors.
The TU-144 had no such system, so surges must have been a severe problem, in the 70's a desperate Tupolev even asked British Aerospace if the Concorde intake system could be adapted for their aircraft, being a product of the BAC guided weapons division while the Cold War was still on, told Tupolev were told no.
TU-144 engines were woefully inefficient in supercruise, so had to have partial reheat for the whole of the supercruise phase, but with huge levels of fuel consumption, Concorde disengaged reheat after an approx 10 minute phase taking the aircraft from Mach 0.95/28,000ft to Mach 1.7/47,000ft.
Both types used reheat on take off, however the TU-144 engines were much heavier than the Olympus 593s.
No way could a TU-144 perform as the payload/range advertised.
The TU-144s environmental control system was much heavier and less efficient than Concorde, apparently so loud that pax (on the few flights inside the USSR that the TU-144 actually flew for a short time) had to wear ear defenders and had to write notes to each other to communicate.
Airframe vibration was also apparently very bad on the Tupolev, I shudder to think about the C.G. issues with fuel transfer with it too.
At the end of the day, Tupolev were ordered by the Kremlin to also build a SST, and do it fast, it actually beat Concorde into the air as a prototype, but it was nowhere near a workable airliner, in many areas the technology just was not there, so they tried to get around these issues.
The Kremlin wanted to match Concorde and the US SST programmes in the 60's, however Concorde can trace it's genesis to extensive studies going right back to the mid 50's, before France and the UK decided to pool their very similar efforts in 1962.
So the TU-144 was conceived and built in a rush, if it was anything like a safe, reliable airliner, with a decent range/payload, why did Aeroflot not use it for PR on routes to say Moscow-Shannon-Havana/New York? By the time it entered limited service the US SST was long dead after all.
As it was, a few flights (often just carrying mail) operated internally within the USSR in the mid 70's until chronic unreliability and technical issues forced the whole programme to be quietly abandoned.
Reports about Soviet spying in Concorde factories are true, but likely all they were trying to do was to confirm that Concorde was the real configuration, that was no 'plan B' in a different configuration if the familiar delta winged one was found wanting.
Even with spying, the technical issues that crippled the TU-144 were insurmountable at the time with the rush to build the aircraft,
given more time, more money, Tupolev would have solved them probably.
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Topic: Russian Concord (TU 144) survives (Read 3100 times)