Sergei Ilyushin's Il-62 is always thought of, perhaps unfairly, as virtually a direct copy of the British Vickers VC10, which was conceived in 1956, around four years before the Russian design was submitted to the Soviet Council of Ministers. Given the greater openness in the West than in the USSR at that time with regard to civil projects, it is hardly surprising that Russian designers would have been aware of British plans to produce a long-range jet airliner capable of competing with the Boeing 707. However, given also the Soviet Union's experience in building large jet aircraft (for example, the Myasishchev M3/M4 Bison bomber and the Tu-104 airliner), the VC10 would have presented few, if any, significant technological challenges to the Soviet aerospace industry at the time. There would have been, therefore, little requirement on the part of the Russians to use 'KGB spies' and clandestine methods to obtain actual plans of the VC10, as has often been suggested, even though the British aircraft embodied fairly advanced aerodynamic design solutions, particularly for the wing. The most important aspect of the design of the VC10, from the. Russian viewpoint, would have been confirmation that the now familiar rear-engined configuration had been adopted for the aircraft. Awareness of this fact: would have provided the impetus for the Ilyushin design team to concentrate on the development of the rear-engined configuration for its own aircraft, saving months of research effort into alternative configurations. To this extent, therefore, the Il-62 can be said to be based on the VC10.
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