ROMBAC 1-11 – yet another communist regime failure

While we were kids in Romania we were continuously brainwashed and indoctrinated. Everything the Romanians did under the communist regime was great, we were living the Golden Age, etc, etc, etc … bleah
I’m happy I can write this down, I can purge the indoctrination and put my mind to good use.
I’ve just learned one thing about ROMBAC 1-11: it has been touted as a great achievement of the regime (imagine that: only Romania and Russia had built commercial jet airliners!) And I was proud when I first read about it!
However, the communists were not able to:

• create a normal supply chain
• properly detect the market
• properly adapt to the market (go figure: the aircraft was banned from landing on Western airports due to high noise levels; and they were not able to change the production to use better engines…)

So only 9 units ever flew, only inside the country. The other 41 planned units were never produced and the entire enterprise went to scrap metal. So the program was not really a failure, but in the end the management (read “Ceausescu”) failed to adapt to market conditions and made it a failure.

I only hope the nostalgic characters still living in our country will finally understand the level of propaganda that poisoned them and start searching for the truth.