Originally Posted by
Jhieminga
The tail prop on the Ilyushin is more a design choice than a mistake, see here:
The competition: Il-62
It allows the use of a smaller tailplane and manually powered elevators.
That's presumably related to the fact that, as I seem to recall, the Il-62 had a huge amount of unused (and presumably unusable) space at the back end of the cabin.
I have fond memories of struggling up shaky steps on the ramp at LHR to fit the massive engine intake blanks on night-stopping Il-62s, and of the weird contraption that Aeroflot used when refuelling to allow them to add anti-freeze to the fuel from the bowser.