In the early seventies commercial air transport had come into mass market with the maturing of the jet aircraft with its advantages of speed and capacity. The next steps were obvious: increased speed and increased capacity. The attempt at more speed, being the more glamorous, turned into a race of the leading nations in aircraft construction: America, France, Britain, and Russia. France and Britain merged their efforts in the project of the Concorde, America dropped out later after considering the project not commercially viable, and Russia joined in, probably out of prestige. According to later sources, the Russian version is largely based on the English/French technology, obtained by spying. The most part of this conjecture was based on the similarities between the designs. Experts in aircraft design know this argument is largely nonsense, since the design of high performance aircraft like a supersonic airliner are largely determined by the laws of aerodynamics, that are the same in any part of the world.. The American design wasn’t dissimilar to both other designs. There was an obvious difference between the European and the Russian design in that the former had its engines located on the wings, the latter on the fuselage.
The big event came in Paris in 1973, where the yearly air show would include a demonstration of both supersonic airliners, the Americans were still in the design phase, and would later fall out of the race. The demonstration of the Concordski turned into disaster, with the aircraft breaking down in mid air, the wreckage crashing on a small village near Paris. Of course, this was considered as the ultimate prove of the supremacy of western technology in a direct comparison.
Again, it took until after the fall of the Soviet Union, for the slightly larger than life truth to come out. And again this was due to the effort of venturing journalists, possibly having been tipped off.
The Concordski differed in one more obvious aspect from the Concorde, in that it small wings nears the front of the fuselage, so called canards. These wings were there to improve stability, and were novel in this application. So they also were a matter of interest for Western experts. To study their effectiveness, and was decided to send a French Mirage jetfighter in the air together with the Concordski, in order to make photographs. Since this more or less a clandestine operation, objective observers would call it spying; the pilots of the Concordski weren’t informed of the presence of another plane. On the day of the fatal demonstration, the weather was slightly cloudy, though not enough to stop the demonstrations, and the spying. What happened that day is a bit of conjecture, but objective insiders consider the following as the most likely, since it explains all that happened. Due to the clouds, the Mirage lost sight of the Concordski. In its attempts to renew the contact it turned towards the guessed flight path of the Concordski. Unluckily, this brought the two aircraft more or less on a head on collision course. The pilot of the Concordski took the obvious evasive action, being a large aircraft: it dived towards the ground. However, putting an aircraft quickly into a dive reduces the air pressure in the engine inlets, and stalls the engines. The normal thing to do was to continue the dive, and try restarting the engines, which was in fact what people on the ground observed. In his effort to get the engines started, the pilot got low to the ground, and had to make a very steep upturn to get to level flying. Such a turn puts heavy loads on the aircraft, which the Concordski could not stand, being a jet liner instead of a jet fighter. So it broke up, and crashed.
Of this description, the thing already known was the behaviour of the Concordski when it got visible again. What wasn’t known was why it behaved so peculiarly. New is the knowledge of the presence of the Mirage. Though officially not acknowledged, its being there has been unofficially admitted by several people; a French investigator in the accident, when interviewed much later, admitted the presence of the Mirage, but broke off the interview when the question was asked if the Russian pilot had been told. Most of the rest has been filled in, from scraps of information, but few objective experts doubt it is this what has happened.
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