Editing Tupolev Tu-144 (section)

===Paris Air Show crash===
{{Main|1973 Paris Air Show Tu-144 crash}}
[[File:Tu144 Le Bourget en.svg|thumb|upright=2|Flight profile of Tu-144 and Mirage IIIR{{cn|date=June 2024}}]]
[[File:1973 06 Bourget TU144 (13).jpg|thumb|Tu-144 at the Paris Air Show, 2 June 1973, the day before the crash.]]
At the [[Paris Air Show]] on 3 June 1973, the development program of the Tu-144 suffered severely when the first ''Tu-144S'' production airliner (reg 77102) crashed.<ref>{{cite AV media |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWv3XcDrgI4 |title=Ce jour où le Tupolev Tu-144 s'est écrasé en plein Bourget |trans-title=The Day the Tupolev Tu-144 Crashed at Le Bourget |language=fr |date=3 June 1973 |publisher=[[Institut national de l'audiovisuel|INA]] |via=YouTube |access-date=13 November 2023 |archive-date=13 November 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231113143829/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWv3XcDrgI4 |url-status=live }}</ref>

At the end of the officially approved demonstration flight, which was an exact repeat of the previous day's display, instead of landing as expected, the aircraft entered a very steep climb before making a violent downwards manoeuvre.<ref name="GordonKomissarovRigmant2015" />{{rp|228}} As it tried to recover, the aircraft broke apart and crashed, destroying 15 houses and killing all six people on board the Tu-144 and eight more on the ground.

Gordon et al.<ref name="GordonKomissarovRigmant2015" />{{page needed|date=November 2023}} state that the flight crew had departed from the approved flight profile for the display. They were under instructions to outperform the Concorde display by all means. During the unapproved, and therefore unrehearsed manoeuvres, the stability and control augmentation system was not operating. If it had been, it would have prevented the loads that caused the port wing to fail.

A popular Soviet theory for the crash was that the Tu-144 tried to avoid a French [[Dassault Mirage III|Mirage]] chase-plane that was attempting to photograph its [[canard (aeronautics)|canards]], which were very advanced for the time, and that the French and Soviet governments colluded with each other to cover up such details. The flight of the Mirage was denied in the original French report of the incident, perhaps because it was engaged in [[industrial espionage]]. More recent reports have admitted the existence of the Mirage (and the fact that the Soviet crew was not told about the Mirage's flight), though not its role in the crash. The official press release did state: "though the inquiry established that there was no real risk of collision between the two aircraft, the Soviet pilot was likely to have been surprised".<ref name="nova98" />