several ceiling panels were ajar, service trays stuck, window shades dropped without being pulled, reading lights did not work, not all toilets worked and a broken ramp delayed departure half an hour. On arrival to Alma-Ata, the Tu-144 was towed back and forth for 25 minutes before it could be aligned with the exit ramp. Equally telling is the number of hours spent on flight testing. Whereas Concorde had been subjected to 5,000 hours of testing by the time it was certified for passenger flight, making it the most tested aircraft ever, total flight testing time of the Tu-144 by the time of its introduction into passenger service was fewer than 800 hours. Flight testing time logged on the prototype (68001) was 180 hours; flight testing time for the Tu-144S until the completion of state acceptance tests was 408 hours; service tests until the commencement of passenger service were 96 hours of flight time; altogether totalling 684 hours. It is unclear why the Minister of Aviation Industry and the Minister of Civil Aviation did not endorse the protocols of state acceptance tests for four months after the tests completion. One reason could be the change of the guard – Minister Dementiev, who was one of the chief backers of Tu-144, died a day before the tests completed – but it might also have something to do with aircraft reliability record uncovered during the tests that was no better than the subsequent dismal service record. External factors contributing to project cancellation Fridlyander points out that in addition to the Tu-144, Tupolev's bureau had to work on other projects, including the Tu-154 passenger aircraft and the Tu-22M bomber. Despite large and high-priority resource investment in the Tu-144 development programme and the fact that a large part of the whole Soviet R&D infrastructure was subordinated to the Tu-144 project, parallel project development overwhelmed the bureau causing it to lose focus and make design errors. (Design errors affected not only the Tu-144, but the Tu-154 as well). The first batch of 120 Tu-154s suffered from wing destruction due to excessive structural load and had to be withdrawn. The rushed introduction to service of poorly tested aircraft happened previously with another Tupolev project that had high political visibility and prestige: the Tu-104 passenger jet-liner was the first successful Soviet passenger jet in service. In a decision-making similar to the Tu-144-story, the Soviet government introduced the