That's what I mean when I say we don't "have" the technology. We can have the knowledge, the science, but without the hardware, we don't have the technology. As an example, we can take something like flush riveting in aircraft or wide-bodied jets. Those weren't super secrets, but for many years the Soviets didn't have the ability to duplicate what was common practice in the US...they didn't have the technology. In the early 80s, it was funny to me that the Soviets were attempting to buy all the Speak-and-Spell toys could lay their hands on for voice warning indicators in their top-line fighter jets...because they didn't even have the technology to duplicate the voice chips. They had to cannibalize them. And for us...those were just toys.
To be fair in the case of Soviet aviation, I would note that widebodied aircraft don’t require anything special, and Sergei Ilyushin, who along with Andrei Tupolev and his son Alexei and also Migoyan, Sukhoi, Yakovlev, Antonov and Soloviev, was one of the great aviation designers of the Soviet Union, had a widebodied transport aircraft, the highly reliable Ilyushin Il-76, flying in the 1970s, and the Il-86 widebodied passenger airliner and its derivative, the Il-96 (the latest version of which, the Il-96-400, was recently rolled out, due to a need to restart the Russian aircraft industry due to foreign sanctions, since it had become highly dependent on the west since the fall of the Soviet Union). The Il-86 and 98 were both released in the course of the 1980s, and have had successful careers; for years the Il-86 operated charter flights from Russia and other former Soviet countries to tourist destinations, such as the beaches of Sharm-el-Sheikh in Sinai, something it was particularly good at, and Cubana de Aviacion has, for many years now, been flying the Il-96-300M from Europe to Cuba, without any accidents.
Also, the Soviets did produce the world’s first successful jetliner, the Tupolev Tu-104, which entered into service shortly after the De Havilland Comet, but unlike the Comet, the original version of which had to be grounded due to a design flaw Involving a navigation window (it was not the square windows along the side of the aircraft so much as it was a dorsal navigation window which was also square, which is where the fatigue cracking began, that resulted in explosive decompression of the aircraft), although once the problems with the Comet were fixed, the Comet 4 had a good service career, as did its military derivative, the Nimrod. However, the Tu-104 entered into service just a couple of years later, and remained in continuous passenger service with Aeroflot until around 1980, and had a reasonably good safety record, good enough for it to not have to be grounded due to a catastrophic design flaw (in which respect it was superior not only to the Comet but to the Lockheed L-188 Electra, the Douglas DC-10, and the Boeing 737 MAX, all three of which had very serious flaws; I would say on the whole the Tu-104, while not a brilliant design, was remarkably good, and deserves to be called the first successful jetliner in continuous passenger service). Likewise, Tupolev also built the Tu-114, which used the wings and counter-rotating turboprop engines of the Tu-95 bomber (the Russian equivalent of the B-52, about the same age and with similar performance), which was the largest and fastest propeller-driven passenger airliner ever built, flying as fast as many smaller regional jets and business jets, at speeds of around 500 MPH. The Tu-114 was also particularly beautiful.
Sergei Ilyushin also designed the Ilyushin Il-62, which was the first long range Soviet jet airliner, and which along with the Tu-154 (which was a particularly rugged trijet with good performance on nasty airfields), formed the backbone of the international fleet of Aeroflot and the airlines of many other Warsaw Pact countries including LOT Polish Airlines and TAROM. The Il-62 was particularly brilliant for the resourcefulness of Sergei Ilyushin: he knew that Soviet technology was lacking in certain areas, such as actuators for slats, and also hydraulic controls in general, so he designed the Il-62 to fly with manual controls, which is impressive given its size (which is comparable to the Boeing 707-320 or the Douglas DC-8-52 and -62 models, and the Vickers Super VC-10, which used the same four rear mounted engine design as the Il-62, which was particularly good for passenger comfort in terms of noise reduction). Furthermore, to get around the lack of a good way to equip the aircraft with slats, Ilyushin and his engineers designed a unique “sawtooth” wing which I think is particularly brilliant, because it performs equally well in the slow speed regime of takeoff and landing and the high speed regime of cruising at altitude, and as a result of doing that, the only hydraulic actuators the Il-62 required were for the flaps, which was simple enough, and for the landing gear, so it was really quite impressive. And Il-62 aircraft had an excellent safety record, particularly by Soviet standards (given the … variable … quality of Aeroflot pilots and mechanics during the Soviet union era, although to be fair, one also has to consider that Aeroflot did perform remarkably well considering it was the world’s largest airline both in fleet size and passenger metrics.
Indeed one thing a lot of people are unaware of concerning Aeroflot is that in the Brezhnev era, with detente, Aeroflot became a very popular way of flying internationally from the US and Europe to destinations in Asia, such as Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and so on. Aeroflot offered free stopovers in London, and their schedules were optimized for efficient connections in London and Moscow, which formed hubs on their international network. Even American tourists not traveling to the Soviet union would fly Aeroflot. Indeed, in the mid 1970s, a trio of Americans who were traveling in Amsterdam and were recruited to serve as drug mules, to bring heroin to Amsterdam from Bangkok, made the mistake of taking Aeroflot, and were busted by the KGB (which aside from its espionage and surveillance activities, were also in charge of border security) at customs in Moscow where they were to connect to their return flight to Amsterdam. This was not a great moment for the US; I find it very offensive that a trio of hippies decided to try to smuggle drugs to Western Europe through the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and so they were deservedly sent to a labor camp. One of them however has appeared on “Locked Up Abroad”, the excellent and often terrifying British documentary series, where he claims he was assisted in escaping from the labor camp and back to the US, and it seems possible. In general, this incident is one of only a handful of incidents in history where I would say one could agree with the KGB on ethical grounds; it’s a bit bizarre to think of the KGB as an ally of the US in the war on drugs, but that was how things were back then (unless I suppose the drugs were headed towards high ranking party officials, but to be fair, in my research of Soviet history, I am unaware of that being a common vice among members of the Politburo, rather, like everyone else in the Soviet union, they seemed to drink insane amounts of vodka).
So while it is true that there were things the Soviets were unable to replicate in terms of our technology, there were other times when occasionally they were ahead of us, like with the Tu-104 or Tu-114, or with the wing design on the Il-62. And few aircraft have ever been as good as the Tu-134 and Tu-154, and the Antonov An-2, the An-24 and the Ilyushin Il-18, when it comes to landing on poor quality runways.
The Soviets also manufactured under license the Douglas DC-3; the Soviet version was the Lisunov Li-2, and it was basically equivalent to the DC-3 in terms of quality. This helped them get things going with their aircraft industry in terms of passenger aviation after some ridiculous failures in the 1930s, where under pressure from Stalin massive aircraft were built that looked impressive but barely were capable of flight, but under Stalin its amazing they were able to build anything at all, due to the interference he caused. For example, for the first Soviet strategic bomber, he demanded an exact replica of the B-29 based on expropriated plans, even insisting on the reproduction of some incorrect riveting.
It was because of these early aircraft, which were direct copies, authorized in the case of the Lisunov Li-2 but unauthorized otherwise, of Western types, that the Soviet designers were accused of stealing Western designs, but in most subsequent cases it was unfounded, and so, or instance, the Tu-154 is only visually similiar to the Boeing 727 in that it shares the same configuration with it and the Hawker Siddeley Trident (which Boeing engineers had a chance to see the designs of, while considering a partnership with Hawker Siddeley, before designing the 727, which sounds like industrial espionage, but actually the Trident and the 727 were quite different under the hood, and I understand why Boeing went with their own design - the Tridents suffered from being too small, and also the final Trident, the Trident 3B, actually had to add a fourth engine in the tail for use during takeoffs to produce extra thrust, which is unimpressive compared to the 727 and the Tu-154; the Vickers VC-10 on the other hand was kind of glorious, as were the Sud-Aviation Caravelle and the BAC 1-11 and the Fokker F-28 and F-100, the four European jetliners made before Airbus was a thing which managed to land significant orders from airlines in the US.
