In 1946–47 the British government approved the export of a small number of Rolls-Royce Nene and Derwent centrifugal-flow jet engines to the Soviet Union — a decision later regarded in Britain as a serious strategic misjudgement. Soviet engineers under Vladimir Klimov reverse-engineered the Nene as the RD-45 and then developed it into the improved VK-1. That engine powered both the MiG-15 fighter and the Il-28 bomber, giving the early Soviet jet fleet a proven, reliable powerplant far sooner than domestic development alone would have allowed.

For the Il-28 the choice was pragmatic. A centrifugal engine was bulkier than the axial designs that would follow, but it was rugged, well understood and easy to build in numbers — exactly the qualities Ilyushin wanted in a bomber meant for mass production and hard field service. The Chinese H-5 later used a locally built VK-1 derivative, the WP-5.

The Il-28 was flown by a crew of three, split between separate pressurised sections. Up front the pilot sat beneath a bubble canopy with an armoured windscreen. Ahead and below him, in the fully glazed nose, the navigator doubled as bombardier, aiming through an optical sight. Both men had ejection seats. The third crewman, in the tail, operated the radio and the defensive gun turret — but had no ejection seat, relying instead on an escape hatch. The arrangement reflected the aircraft’s late-1940s origins: modern enough to protect the two forward crew with ejection seats, yet leaving the gunner in the older position of the wartime bomber.

Much of the Il-28’s long career comes down to how it was built. The airframe was designed for straightforward mass production, assembled from sections that bolted together, with systems that were simple to service. That made it cheap to build in Soviet factories and, just as importantly, easy to keep flying in less-industrialised air forces with limited maintenance infrastructure. The same qualities let China re-derive the design as the Harbin H-5 and keep it in production and service long after Soviet output ended. It is a clear example of an aircraft whose ruggedness and simplicity, rather than raw performance, defined its place in history.

Unlike Western aircraft, the Il-28 has no reliable published unit price or cost-per-flight-hour — Soviet programme economics were not disclosed and any dollar figure would be a guess. What is clear is that the design was optimised for cheap mass production. Commonly cited figures put Soviet output at more than 6,000 aircraft, with the Chinese Harbin H-5 adding several hundred to well over a thousand more depending on the source. That scale, rather than any single flyaway cost, is the meaningful economic fact: the Il-28 was affordable enough to equip the Soviet Air Force and a long list of client states, and simple enough to keep flying for decades. Treat all production totals as approximate; sources differ.