Tu-104 history: two years as the only jet in scheduled airline service

Published

2026-10-02

Updated

2026-10-02

Reviewed by an editor

2026-10-02

The Tu-104 was a passenger jet the Tupolev design bureau built from the Tu-16, a Soviet bomber already in production. From 15 September 1956 to 4 October 1958 it was the world's only turbojet airliner in scheduled airline service, and it cut Moscow - Irkutsk from 18 hours to 7. Over 23 years the fleet carried about 100 million passengers. Two crashes in 1958 were part of the price of going first; Aeroflot retired the type at the end of 1979.

How a bomber became an airliner

Late in 1953 the Tupolev bureau went to the Soviet leadership with a proposal: build a passenger aircraft with turbojet engines on the basis of the production Tu-16. Decree No. 1172-516 of the USSR Council of Ministers, issued on 11 June 1954, ordered a long-range high-speed passenger aircraft designated Tu-16P (Tupolev). Inside the bureau it was "aircraft 104", which became its official name, Tu-104; series production went to Plant No. 135 in Kharkiv.

The shortcut was in the parts list. The Tu-104 took the Tu-16's outer wing panels, engine bays, landing gear, tail surfaces and gear nacelles. What a bomber could not supply was a cabin for people, so the fuselage was designed from scratch: 3.5 m in diameter instead of 2.9 m, and pressurized from the nose all the way back to the tail section. The wing moved from the middle of the fuselage to the bottom. The first version was planned for 50 passengers, with 70-seat and larger versions in mind from the start if the project worked.

According to the manufacturer, the 1954 brief asked for 959 to 1,000 km/h and a range of 3,500 km; those were design requirements, not service figures. The room to grow showed on the prototype already: Flight reported in 1956 that the cabin was more than 11 ft wide, with space for at least 70 tourist-class seats.

The engineers also had the Comet in front of them. In 1954 two of the British jets broke up in flight, and the fleet was grounded. So the Tu-104 airframe became the first in Soviet practice to go through cyclic testing, with loads applied again and again, in a water tank built for the purpose at TsAGI, the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute. According to Air & Space magazine, its fuselage skin was 1.5 mm thick against the Comet's 0.9 mm, and its windows were round rather than square.

The prototype was finished by early 1955 and went straight to the bureau's flight test base at Zhukovsky. Where it was built depends on which Tupolev publication you read: a 2013 history page says the bureau's own experimental workshop, a 2015 anniversary article says the Kharkiv aircraft plant. Air & Space puts the whole job at about 14 months, in 1954-1955, with the first flight two months ahead of schedule.

Test flights and a trip to London

Test pilot Yu. T. Alasheyev took the prototype up for the first time on 17 June 1955. Factory testing ran from 11 June to 12 October 1955, with B. M. Timoshok as co-pilot and P. N. Rudnev as navigator; state trials at the Air Force research institute, GK NII VVS, followed from 31 January to 15 June 1956. On 5 November 1955 the crew of test pilot V. F. Kovalev flew the first production Tu-104 at Kharkiv.

On 22 March 1956, in the middle of the state trials, the prototype flew to London with a group of diplomats and KGB chairman I. A. Serov, who was preparing the visit of N. S. Khrushchev and N. A. Bulganin; the two leaders themselves arrived in Britain in April aboard the cruiser Ordzhonikidze (Hoover Institution). Flight reported that the jet sat cordoned off at London Airport for six days and that its 50 seats were split between a 28-seat main cabin and four small VIP saloons. It was not a scheduled service: the aircraft was still in testing.

15 September 1956: the first scheduled flight

Tu-104s began reaching the civil air fleet in May 1956, and the first unit to get them was a jet aircraft group set up for the purpose at Vnukovo airport in Moscow. On 15 September 1956 a Tu-104 flew the first scheduled passenger service on the Moscow - Omsk - Irkutsk route. The captain was E. P. Barabash, and the aircraft covered 4,570 km, including the stop in Omsk, in 7 hours 10 minutes (Tupolev).

Guinness World Records lists these flights as the world's first sustained jet airline service and says they cut the journey from 18 hours to 7. The manufacturer frames the gain differently: the Tu-104 cruised three times faster than the piston-engined Li-2 and Il-12. For a passenger, Irkutsk in Siberia was now a single day's trip, with 11 fewer hours in the air, all of them in a pressurized cabin.

The Antonov aviation museum in Kyiv gives another date: it says its own exhibit, CCCP-L5415, flew the type's first scheduled service on 19 September. The manufacturer and Guinness both say 15 September. A month later, on 12 October 1956, a Tu-104 under the command of B. P. Bugaev flew the first scheduled international service, to Prague.

Why the Tu-104 had no rivals for two years

De Havilland's Comet had been flying since 1949 and entered scheduled service in 1952, but after two in-flight breakups in 1954 the whole fleet was grounded. It returned only on 4 October 1958, when BOAC opened the first transatlantic jet service, London - New York, with the Comet 4 (Guinness World Records). The Boeing 707 also arrived two years after the Tu-104.

So between 15 September 1956 and 4 October 1958 the Tu-104 was the only turbojet airliner type in scheduled airline service in the world. The claim needs three qualifiers. It covers turbojets only: turboprop airliners were flying in those years. It covers airline service only: the Royal Air Force had been carrying people in military Comet C2s since 1956 (de Havilland Aircraft Museum, Royal Air Force). And it is about an aircraft type, not a single airline: from the end of 1957 Czechoslovak Airlines (CSA) flew the Tu-104A as well (valka.cz). Czechoslovakia was the only foreign buyer, with six Tu-104As.

Sources disagree on where to rank the Tu-104. The Tupolev bureau calls it "the world's first jet passenger aircraft successfully put into service" by Soviet civil aviation. Guinness calls it the second jet airliner to enter service after the Comet, and Air & Space the first to provide continuous scheduled jet service. The Antonov museum in Kyiv calls "the world's first jet airliner" a Soviet myth: by date of first flight, it says, the Tu-104 ranks only sixth, after the Vickers Nene Viking, the Comet, the Avro Canada Jetliner, the Caravelle and the Boeing 367-80.

On 5 September 1957 a Tu-104 landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey after flying some 5,500 miles from Moscow in just under 22 hours; according to a Universal newsreel, it was the first Soviet passenger airliner to land in the United States.

What pilots called "the grab": the 1958 crashes

In 1958 two Tu-104As went down in much the same way: in cruise, at around 12,000 m, the aircraft lost speed and fell out of controlled flight.

The first crash came on 15 August 1958. Tu-104A CCCP-L5442, flying service 04 from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk and on to Moscow, went down in the Khabarovsk region, killing all 64 people on board. According to the Aviation Safety Network, the crew climbed to about 12,000 m to get around heavy cloud; at 66 tonnes the aircraft could barely hold that altitude, lost speed, and both engines flamed out.

The second came on 17 October. Tu-104A CCCP-42362 was flying from Beijing via Omsk to Moscow. Diverting to its alternate, Sverdlovsk, it met a powerful updraft that threw it up to 12,000 m, where it lost speed and control; it crashed 27 km west of Kanash, and all 80 on board, 9 crew and 71 passengers, were killed (ASN). The Kyiv museum sums up the year as two disasters, nearly 150 dead, and in both cases a spin out of cruise flight.

Air & Space reports that the October captain, Harold Kuznetsov, spent the last two minutes of his life talking controllers through whatever he could make out about the aircraft's behaviour. Pilots had a word for what happened: podkhvat, "the grab", when a Tu-104 in an updraft pitched its nose up and stalled. The accounts describe one mechanism: a heavy aircraft near its ceiling had almost no speed margin left, and a rising air current pushed it past the edge of controlled flight.

After the October crash the Tu-104's cruising altitude was capped: at 9,000 m according to ASN, at 10,000 m according to Air & Space. Elevator travel was increased and the stabilizer setting angle reduced, so that pilots had more elevator in reserve against a nose-up pitch. Air & Space adds that after several such incidents in 1958 the wing design and the control system were changed.

201 aircraft and a third of Soviet air travel

Three plants built the Tu-104 in series: No. 135 in Kharkiv, No. 166 in Omsk and No. 22 in Kazan. In 1957 Kharkiv and Omsk switched to the 70-seat Tu-104A, and in 1958 Kazan started on the 100-seat Tu-104B with a stretched fuselage. Over the production run the AM-3 engines gave way to more powerful RD-3, RD-3M and RD-3M-500 engines.

The Kyiv museum lists the early Tu-104 at 50 passengers, two AM-3 turbojets of 8.7 tonnes of thrust each, a length of 38.85 m, a maximum takeoff weight of 74.5 tonnes, a cruising speed of 800 km/h and a range of up to 3,000 km. For the Tu-104B the manufacturer gives a length of 40.06 m, a takeoff weight of 78,100 kg, a cruising speed of 750-800 km/h at 10,000-12,000 m, and a range of 2,120 km with 12,000 kg of payload or 2,750 km with 8,150 kg, with a crew of 4-5. The longer, heavier aircraft carried twice as many people.

By the Tupolev bureau's count, 201 aircraft were built before production ended in 1960. Tallies differ: the Kyiv museum also says 201, the Aviation Safety Network says 207, and the bureau's own figures by version add up to 204: 29 original 50-seat Tu-104s, 80 Tu-104As and 95 Tu-104Bs. Some Tu-104Bs were later refitted with 115 seats.

In 1960, by the bureau's figures, the Tu-104 carried a third of all passenger air traffic in the USSR. Over 23 years in service the fleet flew about 100 million passengers, logged 2 million hours and made 600,000 flights. The manufacturer also credits the crews of Alasheyev and Kovalev with 26 world records for speed and payload set on different versions between 1957 and 1960, and says that in 1957 A. N. Tupolev and a group of the bureau's lead engineers received the Lenin Prize for the aircraft.

How many Tu-104s crashed

The Aviation Safety Network counts 37 Tu-104s lost over the type's history, with 1,023 people killed in 33 hull-loss accidents. The two deadliest came in the autumn of 1973: on 30 September CCCP-42506 crashed near Sverdlovsk, killing 108, and on 13 October Tu-104B CCCP-42486 crashed near Domodedovo, killing 122.

On 17 March 1979 Tu-104B CCCP-42444, departing Vnukovo for Odessa, received a false engine fire warning and crashed while returning to Vnukovo; 58 of the 119 people on board died. According to ASN, the aircraft took off 10.7 tonnes over its permitted weight, and the captain had only 32 hours on the Tu-104.

Why the Tu-104 left service in 1979

Aeroflot ended Tu-104 passenger operations at the end of 1979, although the aircraft went on flying for the armed forces for some time. That date comes from the manufacturer, Air & Space and the Kyiv museum; Guinness gives 1981. Production had stopped in 1960, so by the end of 1979 the youngest airframes were about 19 years old. No Ministry of Civil Aviation order giving the reason for the retirement has turned up in open sources, and nothing in them ties the decision directly to the crash of 17 March 1979.

The full stop came in 1981. On 7 February a Soviet Navy Tu-104A, CCCP-42332, crashed just after takeoff from Pushkin airfield near Leningrad with senior officers of the Pacific Fleet on board. According to ASN, all 50 people were killed; the cause was improper passenger seating and unsecured cargo that shifted after takeoff and upset the aircraft's balance. The Russian edition of Popular Mechanics gives the same 50 dead, 44 passengers and 6 crew, while Air & Space says 52. After this crash, Air & Space reports, the rest of the fleet was put into storage.

The last Tu-104 flight took place on 11 November 1986, when one of the surviving airworthy aircraft flew from the Kola Peninsula to Ulyanovsk, to the civil aviation museum there.

Where to see a Tu-104 today

The Oleg Antonov State Aviation Museum in Kyiv displays Tu-104 CCCP-L5415, factory number 6350101, the first aircraft of the first production series, built in Kharkiv in 1956. It served with the 200th jet aircraft squadron at Vnukovo, spent more than 20 years as a training aid at the Kyiv Institute of Civil Aviation Engineers, and has stood on a plinth since the early 1980s.

The Central Air Force Museum at Monino, outside Moscow, keeps the Tu-104 in which members of the Soviet moon program first trained in weightlessness in the 1960s. The manufacturer lists a version for this work, the Tu-104AK, a flying laboratory for training cosmonauts in brief periods of zero gravity. In the summer of 2018 Kärcher cleaned the aircraft.

In Rybinsk a restored Tu-104A monument was unveiled on 14 October 2016, with work by NPO Saturn and Tupolev (Tupolev). And the civil aviation museum in Ulyanovsk keeps the aircraft from that last flight in 1986.

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• Era: Jet Age, 1955
• In the catalog: Tupolev Tu-104, from 1956

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This text was generated by AI and reviewed by a Jetopolis editor. The person or team responsible for publication is named in the byline. Sources and the review date are provided in the article. Game parameters are distinguished from historical facts.