Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev (Russian: Андрей Николаевич Туполев; November 10, 1888 – December 23, 1972) was a pioneering Soviet aircraft designer.
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Early life
Tupolev was born in Pustomazovo, Russia. During his career, he designed and oversaw the design of more than 100 types of aircraft, some of which set 78 world records. In recognition of his work, he was made an honorary member of Britain's Royal Aeronautical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Work at TsAGI
Tupolev was a leading light of the Moscow-based Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute (TsAGI; (Russian: Центральный аэро-гидродинамический институт; ЦАГИ)) from 1929 until his death in 1972. The Central Design Office or TsKB (Russian: Центральное конструкторское бюро; ЦКБ) based there produced bombers and some airliners. As the number of qualified aircraft designers increased, Tupolev set up his own office, producing a number of designs designated with the prefix ANT (Russian: АНТ) from his initials. However, in 1937, Tupolev was arrested together with Vladimir Petlyakov on trumped up charges of plotting a "Russian Fascist Party." In 1939, he was moved from a prison to an NKVD sharaga for aircraft designers in Bol'shevo near Moscow, with many ex-TsAGI people already set to work. The sharaga soon moved to Moscow and was dubbed "Tupolevka" after its most eminent inmate. Tupolev was tried and convicted in 1940 with a ten year sentence, but was released in 1944 "to conduct important defence work." (He was not to be rehabilitated fully until two years after Stalin's 1953 death.) Main item in the important defence work was the reverse engineering of the USA's Boeing B-29 strategic bomber. The USSR had repeatedly asked, and been denied, lend-lease B-29s. Using three machines which landed in Siberia after bombing Japan in 1945, Tupolev succeeded in replicating the world's first nuclear delivery platform down to trivial detail. Moreover, he got it into volume production, with crews fully trained in time for the 1947 May Day parade. The copy was designated Tu-4, with many subsequent Tu aircraft having the number 4 in their designations.
Design of the Tu-95
By the time of his rehabilitation in 1955, Tupolev had designed and was about to start testing his unique turboprop strategic bomber, the Tu-95. In the years to come, he beat off able competition from Vladimir Myasischev and his M-4 series of jet-powered strategic bombers. This was in part thanks to Tupolev's close rapport with Nikita Khrushchev who had denounced Stalin's terror, a victim of which Tupolev had been.
Commercial aviation
At about the same time, Tupolev introduced into service the world's second jet airliner, the Tu-104. The aeroplane was the first jet transport to stay in uninterrupted service, and the only one in service anywhere in the world for two years until late 1958. It was followed by a series of Tu passenger jets, including the supersonic Tu-144, designed by Tupolev's son Alexei Tupolev (1925–2001).
Loss of power in the Soviet Union
After Khruschev's removal from office in late 1964, the ageing Tupolev gradually lost positions at the centres of power to rivals. Though the prestige Tu-144 programme enjoyed top level support until 1973, as did the important Tu-154, these positions were never recovered, being largely taken up by Ilyushin. To his contemporaries, Tupolev was known as a witty but crude master of mat (a rapid-fire Russian male-speak infused with obscenity) who invariably and energetically insisted on fast and adequate technical fixes at the expense of scholastic ideal solutions. A hallmark of his was to get an aeroplane into service very rapidly; then began an often interminable process of improving the shortcomings of the "quick and dirty" initial design. To his competitors among the Soviet aircraft design community, he was known above all as politically astute; a shrewd and unforgiving rival. Tupolev was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
