Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Daniel Gordon.

Today I'm taking you back to France in June 1973 and a fateful day in the race between the Soviet Union and the West to produce the world's first

supersonic airliner. The Paris airshow. The Booshe is the biggest

international display in the world. The only place where the Russians, the Americans and the West Europeans, all the countries

with advanced technologies meet to demonstrate their expensive wares to their potential

military and civilian customers.

The Star attractions at the 1973 Paris Air Show were two jet airliners, both designed to carry

passengers at more than twice the speed of sound, the Anglo-French

Concord and a plane known by the Western press as Kond Kordsky.

Concord's now largely forgotten Russian rival, the Tupalev Tu-144.

On this take off on Saturday afternoon, Concord would be followed as usual nine minutes later by the

T-U-144, its Russian rival and fellow pioneer.

Amongst the crowd of 300,000 on the airfield

was British test pilot John Farley.

He'd finished flying his own display and was watching anxiously as disaster struck the

TU 144.

It climbed steeply before suddenly to the nose went down from this steep climb very violently.

Now you don't normally do that with an airplane and I went oh what made him level off like that?

Well, the airplane then started to come down steeply.

And there is a point where if you are an experienced air show display pilot,

you look at this picture and you think there's something wrong with this picture.

Some seconds later, on the other side of the airfield, she was diving and about to crash.

...