The Tupolev Tu-104 (NATO reporting name: Camel) is a medium-range, narrow-body, twin turbojet-powered Soviet airliner. It was the second to enter regular service, behind the British de Havilland Comet and was the only jetliner operating in the world from 1956 to 1958, when the British jetliner was grounded due to safety concerns. In 1957, Czechoslovak Airlines – ČSA (now Czech Airlines), became the first airline in the world to fly a route exclusively with jet airliners, using the Tu-104A variant between Prague and Moscow. In civilian service, the Tu-104 carried over 90 million passengers with Aeroflot (then the world's largest airline), and a lesser number with ČSA, while it also was operated by the Soviet Air Force. Its successors included the Tu-124, Tu-134, and Tu-154.

Design and development

At the beginning of the 1950s, the Soviet Union's Aeroflot airline needed a modern airliner with better capacity and performance than the piston-engined aircraft then in operation. The design request was filled by the Tupolev OKB, which based their new airliner on its Tu-16 "Badger" strategic bomber. The wings, engines, and tail surfaces of the Tu-16 were retained with the airliner, but the new design adopted a wider, pressurised fuselage designed to accommodate 50 passengers. The prototype build in MMZ 'Opit' first flew on June 17, 1955, with Yu.L. Alasheyev at the controls. It was fitted with a drag parachute to shorten the landing distance by up to 400 m, since at the time, not many airports had sufficiently long runways. The first serial TU-104 took off on 5 November 1955. The Tu-104 was powered by two Mikulin AM-3 turbojets placed in the wing roots (resembling the configuration of the de Havilland Comet). The crew consisted of two pilots, a navigator (seated in the glazed "bomber" nose), a flight engineer, and a radio operator (later eliminated). The airplane raised great curiosity by its lavish "Victorian" interior – so-called by some Western observers – due to the materials used: mahogany, copper, and lace. Tu-104 pilots were trained on the Ilyushin Il-28 bomber, followed by mail flights on an unarmed Tu-16 bomber painted in Aeroflot colors, between Moscow and Sverdlovsk. Pilots with previous Tu-16 experience transitioned into the Tu-104 with relative ease. The Tu-104 was considered difficult to fly, as it was heavy on controls and quite fast on final approach, and at low speeds displayed a tendency to stall, a feature common with highly swept wings. Experience with the Tu-104 led the Tupolev Design Bureau to develop the world's first turbofan series-built airliner, the Tupolev Tu-124, designed for local markets, and subsequently the more commercially successful Tu-134.

Operational history

On 15 September 1956, the Tu-104 began revenue service on Aeroflot's Moscow-Omsk-Irkutsk route, replacing the Ilyushin Il-14. The flight time was reduced from 13 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 40 minutes, and the new jet dramatically increased the level of passenger comfort. By 1957, Aeroflot had placed the Tu-104 in service on routes from Vnukovo Airport in Moscow to London, Budapest, Copenhagen, Beijing, Brussels, Ottawa, Delhi, and Prague. In 1957, ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines became the only export customer for the Tu-104, placing the aircraft on routes to Moscow, Paris, and Brussels. ČSA bought six Tu-104As (four new and two used aircraft) configured for 81 passengers. Three of these were subsequently written off (one due to a refueling incident in India and another to a pilot error without fatalities). In 1959, a Tu-104 was leased to Sir Henry Lunn Ltd. (Lunn Poly) of London, who used the aircraft to transport holiday-makers to Russia with a 4.5-hour flight time. Whilst the Tu-104 continued to be used by Aeroflot throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the safety record of the aircraft was poor in comparison to Western jetliners (16 of 96 aircraft were lost in accidents). The Tu-104 was unreliable, heavy, and very unstable with poor control response and an inclination to Dutch roll. Poor design aerodynamics of the wings resulted in a propensity to stall with little or no warning and a dangerous tendency to pitch up violently before stalling and entering an irrecoverable dive. Due to the fear of inadvertent stalls, aircrew flew approaches above the recommended approach speed, landing at 270 - 300 km/h, nearly 50 km/h faster. At least two accidents were attributed to the pitch-up phenomenon, prompting changes to the design of the aircraft and operating procedures, but the problem remained. Aeroflot retired the Tu-104 from civilian service in March 1979 following a fatal accident at Moscow, but several aircraft were transferred to the Soviet military, which used them as staff transports and to train cosmonauts in zero gravity. After a military Tu-104 crash in February 1981 killed 50 people (17 were senior army and naval staff), the type was permanently removed from service. The last flight of the Tu-104 was a ferry flight to Ulyanovsk Aircraft Museum on 11 November 1986.

Variants

Data from:

Former operators

Accidents and incidents

According to the American Flight Safety Foundation, between 1958 and 1981, 16 Tu-104s were lost in crashes out of 37 aircraft written off (hull loss rate = 18%) with a total of 1140 fatalities.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

Total deaths

From this listing of crashes due to mechanical or pilot error, the total number of deaths is 939, without the addition the Borispol Airport 1976 incident. Shot down or bombed airplanes are not in the total.

Specifications (Tu-104B)