This pilot defected with the Soviet Union's most advanced plane

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel, you are correct, it was returned with several key pieces missing.

Sgt Joe LaBranche - Damn it, Don't you hate when s**t gets lost in the Mail! LOL!

Sgt Joe LaBranche - Still say the most wicked aircraft in my Day was the Mig-29. Give me a Mig-29 with a US Navy Pilot and I'll show you something truly amazing.

This incident happened in 1976, SGT David A. Groth, but you are correct, the U.S. did gain an insight into Russian technology!

Sgt Joe LaBranche - The Chinese learned a lot from reverse engineering the EP-3 Recon plane that had to land after clipping the Chinese interceptor. The Chinese pilot died from getting too close and showing his e-mail on a piece of paper.
The plane did an emergency landing and the crew destroyed what they could but the Chinese, the guys that make most of the USA laptops, reverse engineered the hardware the crew tried to destroy. I can't believe this is 15 years ago!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu329AbxRHU

We already have the secrets of the Abrahms tank out for Iran or others to see since we were stupid to give them dozens of M1A1s to Iraq and they in turn gave them to Hezbollah a terrorist militia that is supported by Iran.

LTC (Join to see) - Major; There are very few "secrets" of the Abrams tank that are available through simple examination. Even the metallurgy isn't reproducible simply because you know the percentage of elements in the armour.

SrA Edward Vong - Airman; If you already have copies of the blueprints then you don't actually need to have a "real" aircraft to find out what makes it tick. (You may not be able to build one, but you can sure study the heck out of it.)

COL Ted Mc
Funny that you mention that. The technical orders for various aircraft with some schematics can actually be accessed and available all throughout the web.

SrA Edward Vong - Airman; And if you get caught letting the Russians have access to them then they are going to be retroactively classified and you are going to be prosecuted because you should have known that the US government was going to retroactively classify them and that means that you deliberately allowed the Russians to have access to classified materials (even though they weren't classified at the time you did it [because you SHOULD have known that they WOULD {eventually} be classified]).