A quiet afternoon with the Tu-104, fifty years after it last carried passengers.
The first Soviet jetliner is parked in a hangar outside Ulyanovsk. Its engineers are gone; its airframe is not. I spent two days walking around it with a notebook and a torch.
The hangar at Ulyanovsk is colder than the runway, and it smells faintly of kerosene that has not burned in thirty years. The aircraft itself, registration CCCP-L5412, was the eleventh Tu-104 to leave the Kazan line in 1957, and it is, by a margin its caretakers will not let me forget, the most original surviving example anywhere. Nothing has been repainted. The bare-aluminium fuselage carries every scuff of its working life.
Notes from the cockpit
What strikes you first is not the size — the Tu-104 is small by any standard after 1965 — but the geometry of the controls. The flight engineer's station faces inward, away from the windows, on the principle that a man reading dials does not need a horizon. The throttle quadrant is brass. The yoke is shaped to be gripped with gloves on, because for the first decade the cabin pressurisation was, at best, optimistic.