The 1973 Paris Air Show Tu-144 crash of Sunday 3 June 1973 destroyed the second production model of the Soviet supersonic Tupolev Tu-144.

The aircraft disintegrated in the air while performing extreme manoeuvres and fell on the town of Goussainville, Val-d'Oise, France, killing all six crew members and eight people on the ground.

[12] After several minutes in the air performing aerobatic manoeuvres in its second demonstration flight of the show, the Tu-144 flew a high-speed pass above the runway with the landing gear out and the "moustache" canards extended then, with all four engines at full power, it went into a steep and rapid climb.

The aircraft snap-rolled left and inverted, overload stresses fractured the fuselage forward of the wing, and fuel vapour ignited.

"[13] The aircraft broke apart in mid-air and crashed in flames on the town of Goussainville, eight kilometres north of Le Bourget,[8][6][9] destroying 15 houses[14] and killing all six people on board the Tu-144 and eight more on the ground.

[16] Following the crash, Marcel Dassault called for the 1975 Paris Air Show to be held at Istres, which is situated in open country 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Marseille.

Although not a major factor within the Soviet Union, environmental concerns about the supersonic transport (SST) concept were increasing in the West.

[19] Historian Howard Moon speculates that these factors—together with continuing technical problems, an overextended Tupolev design bureau, high development costs coupled with a scarcity of alternate applications for Tu-144 technologies, and high fuel prices in the West stemming from the 1973 oil crisis a few months later—prompted Soviet leaders to deprioritize the aircraft's service entry with Aeroflot, as its value as a prestigious symbol of Soviet technical prowess had diminished.

However, due to a lack of concrete evidence supporting this theory, the commission concluded that the exact cause of the disaster remains undetermined.

[15] The flight of the Mirage was denied in the original French report of the incident,[citation needed] perhaps because it was engaged in industrial espionage.

However, the official press release did state: "though the inquiry established that there was no real risk of collision between the two aircraft, the Soviet pilot was likely to have been surprised".