FlyPast: None so impressive as the mighty Tupolev Tu-114

May 15 2009 By Barry Dix

the mighty Tupolev Tu-114.

ALL sorts of weird and wonderful aircraft have paid visits to Heathrow over the years, including the recently-featured bulbous Guppies, barely-airworthy old freighters, swish Vulcan bombers and even the occasional seaplane.

But surely none has been as impressive nor as fascinating as the daddy of them all, the mighty Tupolev Tu-114.

With its towering size, lanky undercarriage and eight-bladed propellers, perfectly illustrated here in this stunning photograph by Brian Service, it loomed over every other plane on the tarmac, like a praying mantis in a tankful of crickets.

It was so high that two sets of conventional aircraft steps had to be brought into action to enable passengers to disembark.

When I featured Tu-114s in Fly Past in November 2007, I mentioned they had been seen only a handful of times at LHR.

I’ve since learned, through the statistic-packed book Heathrow ATC, the First 50 Years, that they made a total of just four visits.

Brian, who lives in Stanwell, was lucky enough to have been present on one of those occasions.

He recalls: "The sheer scale of the plane was breathtaking.

"It really did have to be seen to be believed."

Those eight-bladed contra-rotating propellers and enormous Kuznetsov engines – the most powerful turboprops ever fitted to an aircraft – were certainly needed.

The Tu-114s were 177ft 6ins long, with a wingspan of 167ft 8ins, and could carry up to 220 passengers non-stop for more than 5,000 miles at a speed of almost 500mph.

Entering service in the autumn of 1957, they continued to fly on Aeroflot longhaul routes until 1976.

Their four visits to Heathrow included two within a few days of each other in February 1963, when CCCP 7648170 flew a party of 170 British businessmen to Moscow and back.

One of the other LHR visits apparently involved the return of a group of British trades union delegates from the USSR, several of whom had been seriously injured in a road accident.

Despite the fact that Tu-114s were retired from airline service 33 years ago, we’ve not seen the last of these mighty machines.

In their military guise they are still used for surveillance patrols above the North Sea and spark off the occasional sensationalist story in the national media, with dramatic pictures of RAF fighters escorting them away from British airspace.

At least two civil versions survive, in non-flying condition, one at an aviation institute in the Ukraine and the other at the Russian Federation Air Force Museum at Monino, but, sadly, a Tu-114 which had been on view at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport for many years has been scrapped.