I know all about the Blackjack’s lineage and how it came from Myasischev (I’ll bet they were PISSED when it was given to Tuploev) but to think it simply coincidence is pushing it beyond belief.
Myasischev didn’t have the infrastructure to develop and build 100 BLACKJACKs (the number the Soviets thought they’d build). They were probably pissed but they really didn’t have a leg to stand on. Anyway, the two aircraft (Tu-160 and B-1) are very dissimilar when you get down to it. All moving upper tail, very large glove fairings, etc. The Tu-160 as it exists was altered from the Myasischev design to incorporate a new tail section and other refinements. If you look at the design lineage of the Myasischev proposal, how they got to where they did made sense. Were it a straight copy a lot of that work wouldn’t have had to be done.
Re the Tu-144 it’s pretty much common knowledge that Russia got a complete set of Concorde drawings.
There was espionage, no doubt. A lot of it is covered in Howard Moon’s book, pretty good read. But Tupolev had a basic design pretty early on, and while it was also a delta wing, it had little to do with Concorde. Tupolev favored a large engine pod under the wing, as seen on the prototype, but this was abandoned for the serial aircraft. Were they copying the Concorde, they’d have dropped the podded idea.
Both of these are basically examples where even if there was any outside “aid” via espionage or otherwise, the Russians came up with similar designs to the Western counterparts because of very similar requirements.
As for the Mig and Su as I understand it TsAGI came up with the basic properties and the two manufacturers incorporated the research into their own designs.
TsAGI came up with the whole lifting body idea, with separated nacelles. The concept was sent out to MiG and Sukhoi who would build a light and heavy fighter based on those concepts. That’s why both jets seem to be very closely related, albeit differing in size.
Sign In
