TU-104 on display in Russia.
Yes, it's true. There was a brief period from around 1956 until 1958 when the only operational jet airliner was Russian.
How could this be? Well, the British beat everyone to the jet airliner game in 1952 with the de Havilland Comet. Unfortunately the Comet was a little too far ahead of its time. Metal fatigue and the effects of pressurization/depressurization cycles weren't quite understood yet. After three Comets were mysteriously lost due to in flight structural failure, the fleet was grounded.
The ill-fated de Havilland Comet
Meanwhile the Boeing 707 and was still in the works and wouldn't enter service until late 1958.
That left the Russians.
The Tupolev TU-104 was a direct development of their TU-16 bomber. This is one of those designs that just won't die. The Chinese military still operates a home-grown copy of the TU-16 called the Xian H-6.
TU-16 "Badger"
Tupolev took the wings, tail and engines from the bomber and added a wider fuselage to create the airliner version. The initial version could hold 50 passengers but there was a lot of untapped capacity there. With upgraded engines and a stretched fuselage the final TU-104B version could carry up to 115 passengers.
It's a pretty straightforward design with moderately swept wings and a conventional tail. Cruise speed was around .75 Mach and top speed was .86 Mach. Cruise altitude was 12,000 meters or right around 39,000 feet.
One notable feature is that the two Mikulin turbojets are buried in the wing root. The British also used to like this configuration but it has some drawbacks. Access to the engines for maintenance is difficult. More engine vibration finds its way into the cabin and the aircraft structure. That's also about the worst place I can think to have an engine fire. There's a reason they don't make 'em like that anymore.
Flight controls, as far as I can tell, were manually actuated. What few reports I've been able to find say that control forces were heavy. There were no flight spoilers. Roll control was purely by aileron. There were no leading-edge flaps, but the trailing edge flaps were suitably large. Approach speeds were in the 155 knot range.
There were no thrust reversers. Stopping was assisted by two drag chutes. To my knowledge the Russians were the only people to ever use a drag chute on an airliner. Having flown with drag chutes on the B-52, they're a mixed blessing. They stop you well enough but in a crosswind they can make you weather-vane into the wind.
TU-104 landing roll at Arlanda (Stockholm) sometime in the mid 1960s.
Another odd feature is the glass nose. Contrary to what many in the West thought, this was
not so the plane could be converted to a bomber! Where do we come up with this stuff?
The Soviet Union was a huge country and much of it was sparsely populated. Radio navigation aids were few and far between. We sometimes referred to them as "a third-world country with rockets" and there's some truth to that.
Simply put, the Russians were still doing a lot of visual navigation well into the 1960s. The glass nose was for the Navigator to reference visual landmarks. There was no nefarious Commie scheme to turn airliners into bombers.
TU-104 Cockpit. You can see the Navigator's compartment clearly.
Another noteworthy feature is the landing gear. Tupolev always liked to retract the main gear backwards into streamlined compartments behind the wing. The bane of Soviet airliners was that they all had to carry around way too much landing gear. A lot of their runways were pretty crude. For a 50-seat airliner the TU-104 had the main gear of a much larger aircraft. Nobody else puts 4-wheeled main trucks on a 50-seat aircraft.
Between the heavy landing gear and their generally thirsty engines, every Russian built airliner was a fuel hog. Their planes never hurt for power but they guzzled gas. Today Aeroflot operates Western designs from Boeing and Airbus.
TU-124 in Aeroflot colors. I think it's an attractive design.
The TU-104 was successful enough that they immediately built a 3/4 scale version of it for regional operations. This was the TU-124, which has the distinction of being the first turbofan powered airliner. The 124 had a few other improvements over its larger brother. Larger double-slotted flaps, ground spoilers plus a large speed-brake mounted under the belly between the landing gear.
TU-124 cockpit. The Captain's throttles are on his left and the First Officer's throttles are on his right. There is no center console so that the Navigator could get in and out of the nose compartment.
Interior shot of a TU-124 (I think)
The TU-104 caused a bit of a stir in the West, sparking accusations of falling behind in the "jet race". Just like the space race, national pride was at stake here. The Russians once flew three of them to London just to dispel rumors that they only had a single prototype in service.
Today jet travel is incredibly safe but this was not so in the early days. Tupelov correctly guessed that the Comet losses were due to structural failure. He deliberately made the TU-104 "beefier" than the Comet for this reason. Most notably he designed it with round windows. The original square windows on the Comet had a weak point at the corner of the window. To this day the windows on jet airliners have rounded corners.
Still the TU-104 had a fatal flaw - it suffered from instability when encountering turbulence at high altitude. Two were lost early on due unrecoverable stall/spins after hitting turbulence. This was in the days before Flight Data Recorders and they may never have found out what was causing "the grab", as pilots called it, to fling Tupolevs out of the sky.
Old Life Magazine photo showing manly Russian pilots smoking.
Except for a certain
Captain Garold Kuznetsov. As his doomed TU-104 spun in from 40,000 feet, Captain Kuznetsov calmly radioed his flight data - all the way to impact. Brave dude. He knew he was done for but getting the message out would help others.
With Kuznetsov's data in hand, they were able to redesign the TU-104 and eliminate most of its problems. Even then the TU-104 had a fairly high hull-loss rate of 18%, with a total of 16 being lost to crashes over the years. I would say that some of that is due to the difficulties of operating in the Soviet Union. Conditions were harsh and infrastructure was limited.
All of the early jets had high loss rates because this was unknown territory at the time. Still, 18% is quite a bit higher than Western types like the 707 and DC-8. Tupolev himself once stubbornly said "There's nothing wrong with my airplane, you just don't know how to fly it!"
When a Soviet Navy version crashed in 1981, killing most of the Pacific Fleet's senior commanders, the type was grounded for good.