Aleksandr Yakovlev, a chief Soviet aviation designer, flashed a wide smile and waved his arm at the line-up of Russian commercial aircraft. "You have never seen anything like this," he said. In the cold, professional judgment of Western aviation experts at the Paris Air Show last week, Yakovlev was right. The Russians were stealing the show.
Soviet aerospace exhibits have not gone unnoticed at previous Paris shows. A prime attraction of the 1965 exhibition was the AN-22 turboprop, the world's biggest aircraft at the time. In 1967, the gigantic display of Russian...
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