Useless information 5

Ever heard of the one time the USSR stole a bomber from the Americans and just straight up copied it. The Tu-4 is a one to one copy of the American Boeing B-29. It was done after a B-29 was forced to land on to a Soviet Navy airbase 18.6 miles east of Vladivostok, on 20th July 1944. The plane landed there because at the time, they were not able to return to base and Russia was the closest allied country to the US. When the plane landed, the crew was put under arrest and the plane was taken. This was the first of five B-29 bombers to have to make a forced landing in Russia. Although the 5th bomber was returned to the united states along with it’s crew, the other four planes were taken and studied intently. Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev was put in charge of examining and reproducing the aircraft. Tupolev examined every single piece of the stolen B-29s, and documented them thoroughly. The reason that the USSR did this was that they had no long range strategic bomber that was…well good. They had the Pe-8, but that was outclassed in many ways compared to western offerings and was produced only in very small numbers. The biggest problem that they had on replicating the B-29 was converting all the bolts to metric, which thinking about it is really funny. Over 900 factories and research institutes were involved in the effort, producing 105,000 technical drawings to replicate the aircraft. Despite that, the first prototype flew on May 19, 1947. Western observers were stunned at the Tushino Air Show in Moscow when three Tu-4 bombers flew overhead, looking identical to the American Boeing B-29. This confused the heck out of the western representatives, thinking that it might just be a similar looking plane, but they were wrong. They had just seen the Tu-4 bomber, that was totally, a Soviet Original (trust me bro)

This is an image of an Tu-4, which looks LITERALLY THE SAME AS A B-29