Against the backdrop of the Trump administration's various military aviation initiatives for the United States, it is worth recalling how in 2019 russian dictator Putin proposed creating a supersonic airliner based on the Tu-160 strategic bomber.
This idea caused considerable surprise, but it never came to fruition. In other words, the russian military industry has not started work on the passenger variant of the Tu-160. However, this historical example is quite revealing.
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On the one hand, it can be said that for the Kremlin dictator, the Tu-160 is effectively a "passenger" aircraft, since strategic bombers like this have been used for russian propaganda purposes.
On the other hand, in the second half of the 1990s, the russian Tupolev Design Bureau was seriously working on a project to convert the Tu-22M3 into a supersonic Tu-344 airliner. In this case, the plane was assumed to be primarily used for transporting government officials or wealthy businessmen. Moreover, the passenger compartment was expected to have a low capacity of 10 to 12 people.
The Tu-22M3 and Tu-344 were expected to have identical characteristics except for the nature of the "payload" carried. When we take a look at how exactly the Tupolev Design Bureau proposed to accommodate passengers in the Tu-344, it becomes clear why the project was never carried out:
With VIP passengers crammed inside the bomb bay, it doesn't surprise no company was interested in buying such a "premium" airliner.
After this attempt, the engineers at the Tupolev Design Bureau re-evaluated their experience with the Tu-344 project and concluded that they simply needed to develop a specialized supersonic passenger aircraft. This idea was embodied in the Tu-444 project, which immediately inherited one of its predecessor’s drawbacks — a limited niche of use.
With a maximum takeoff weight of 41 tons, a fuselage length 36 meters, and a wingspan of 16.2 meters, the aircraft was designed to carry a maximum of 10 passengers. The work started in 2004, with a prototype's first flight scheduled for 2015. However, just a few years into development, the project was halted in 2008 at the preliminary design stage, as the priority shifted to the SSJ-100 program. The russian government decided to allocate no more funds for the Tu-444, which anyway had limited use from the get-go and lacked prestige both domestically and internationally.
That explains why decades later, the Kremlin dictator came up with the idea of creating a passenger variant out of the Tu-160 strategic bomber, as it just an echo of previous concepts floating for a while.
Here we should also recall the Tu-114 airliner as another example because it was created based on the Tu-95 bomber. To its last days notorious for its high noise level, the jet was decommissioned in 1976.
As Defense Express reported that the Trump administration wants to discard AWACS aircraft.
Read more: russia Deployed Over Forty Tu-22M3 Heavy Bombers to Belaya Airbase, Shuffles Tu-95MS and Tu-160s To and Fro
