Tu-154M will still fly

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

The Tu-154M passenger liner, which became the most common jet aircraft in the Soviet Union, was conceived as a replacement for the Il-18 and An-10, which in the early sixties formed the basis of Aeroflot's aviation fleet. A new, faster, economical and comfortable car was required, approximately the same as the American Boeing 727.

The similarity of technical requirements dictated a similar scheme - a monoplane with a swept low wing, a tail unit with stabilizers above the elevator and three engines: one built-in central and two on pylon brackets on the sides of the rear fuselage.

In 1968 Tu-154 was lifted into the sky. Four years later, in 1972, commercial operation began on the Moscow-Mineralnye Vody line.

The first modification was called Tu-154 A. The improvement consisted mainly in the installation of NK-2-U engines - more powerful than it was supposed in the initial version.

Starting from 1976, the liner was modified again, this time the changes were more ambitious, and the mechanization of the wing, the passenger compartment, and on-board equipment were subjected to them. In this form, the aircraft began to be calledTu-154B and was produced until 1981. Although it was originally proposed to rename it the Tu-164, the design improvements were so significant. During scheduled overhaul, early production airliners were re-equipped to the technical level of the latest modification.

However, stresses in the airframe continued to cause complaints from aircraft maintenance technicians. During each of the flights, rivets fell out of the skin, they had to be restored. This shortcoming, as well as a number of other problems, was eliminated during the third major (and there were more than two dozen in total) modifications.

In 1984, work on the creation of the Tu-154M was completed. More than three hundred of these liners were built. The result is a great aircraft. The number of passengers has increased to 180 people, and the reliability of the liner has increased significantly. Proof of the "survivability" of the aircraft in difficult conditions was a masterfully executed landing at an abandoned airfield near the city of Ukhta in 2010, when the pilots managed to save the lives of passengers with a complete failure of on-board electrical equipment. The Tu-154M aircraft has been restored and its operation continues.

The crash of the Polish Air Force presidential plane in Smolensk, which occurred in the same year, gave reason to talk about the unreliability of Soviet-made aircraft, but the investigation proved that it was caused by forcing the pilot to land in adverse weather conditions, in which any, most modern, the liner would behave in much the same way.

In general, it is consideredthat the engine life of the Tu-154M allows it to serve a quarter of a century or stay in the air for fifteen thousand hours. The cruising ceiling exceeds 12 kilometers, and the speed is 900 km/h. The well-made and capable of carrying out passenger transportation, which are at the disposal of many airlines in Russia, near and far abroad, can be modernized, equipped with digital avionics, and even after some refinement, use liquefied gas as fuel. Since the late nineties, KB im. A. N. Tupolev proposes to carry out work to extend the engine life and bring the Tu-154M up to the level of modern requirements for airliners. There are customers.