Leave it those Russians! This one seems to have at least 12 engines:
http://www.venkia.com/pdata/21351.jpg
In the spring, I had my first flight on an Antonov (An-148). It has a high-mounted wing, so from my seat I had an excellent view of engine 1 -- it's almost the only thing you can see!
No, it's not just something from a kid's nightmare -- the USSR really built and tested this monster. It still sits (long silent) on the shore of the Caspian sea:
I'd be tempted to take a look at it, if it weren't in a seriously rough neighborhood. It's designed to operate permanently in what aerodynamicists call "ground effect," never more than a few meters above the water.
In the 1990s, Boeing was working on the development of a new supersonic airliner that would be economically viable -- Concorde ticket sales never covered the high costs. The program was called High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT).
HSCT wasn't much advertised; I probably wouldn't have known of it, except that my cousin (an aerodynamicist) was a liaison between Boeing and a NASA laboratory. The development costs being so high, Boeing was taking advantage of government assistance in research and development. My cousin told me at the time that they were preparing to use a Tu-144 in the R&D effort.
Hence the US flag on that particular Tu-144 (tail # 77114) which served as a flying testbed for NASA and Boeing.
In the mid-90's, Boeing was hoping to exceed Mach 2.0, though apparently they let go of this as the program continued. In flight faster than sound, skin temperatures increase steeply with increasing speed, and already by Mach 2.3 (which would shorten a Pacific Ocean crossing by less than an hour, compared to Mach 2.0) the materials required to take the heat make big penalties in cost & weight.
Part of Boeing's concept was to get rid of the heavy and costly "droop nose" of the Concorde and Tu-144 (or the heavy and costly swing-wing in some of Boeing's own 1960's SST designs) by requiring the pilots to rely on TV cameras to see what's in front of them for takeoff and landing. I always wondered what the FAA (and ALPA) would make of that! But HSCT was cancelled in 1999.
During supersonic flight, the heat against the metals would cause the Concorde to increase in size and on one Concorde's final flight, one of the few occasions when it was allowed to fly supersonic over land, on this occasion Canada whilst it was setting a new flight time record between New York and Seattle, the flight engineer, during flight, wedged his hat in to the gap created between two instrument panels, and as the flight slowed down, landed etc, the instrument panels closed on each other with said hat to remain wedged in there for ever more.
Alas just one Concorde remains in a condition whereas it may one day take to the skies again ... which was rumoured to be for the 2012 Paris Olympics but us Brits put paid to that one. :)