Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur.

In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that offered a different bargain. If things went badly, the pilot would not leave the aircraft. The front of the aircraft would leave with him.

The Sukhoi Su-17 never flew. It was not flown once, by anyone, and the single example built was eventually shot to pieces on a range as a target. Almost nobody has heard of it, partly because Sukhoi later gave the same designation to a completely different and very famous swing-wing fighter-bomber.

Designed to Match the Theory

The Su-17 was not designed to a squadron requirement so much as to a set of numbers. TsAGI, the Soviet central aerodynamics institute, had produced theoretical calculations for supersonic performance, and Sukhoi set out to build the aeroplane those calculations described.

That produced a 50-degree swept wing, which in 1949 was aggressive. It also produced air brakes and, more remarkably, boosted flying controls. Hydraulically assisted controls were still a novelty anywhere in the world at that point, and they are precisely what the Hawker P.1081 lacked when it killed its test pilot in a transonic dive two years later.

On paper the aircraft would reach 1,209 km/h at sea level and run up against Mach 0.985 as its limit. It would climb to 10,000 metres in four minutes and carry two 37 mm cannon. It would also, if required, come apart on purpose.

The Nose Came Off

This is the part worth pausing on.

The Su-17 had an ejection seat like any other fighter. But Sukhoi also arranged for the entire nose section, with the cockpit and the pilot inside it, to separate from the rest of the airframe.

The logic is sound and it is the same logic that produced escape capsules in the West more than a decade later. At very high speed, a pilot ejected into the airstream is hit by a wall of air that can break limbs, strip off a helmet or kill outright. A pilot inside a sealed structure is not. He keeps his cockpit, his pressurisation and his oxygen, and he descends inside a box rather than exposed.

American aircraft got there in the 1960s. The B-58 Hustler received encapsulated seats, and the F-111 was built around a crew module that separated from the fuselage and came down under its own parachute. Sukhoi’s draughtsmen had sketched the same principle in 1949, on an aircraft that never started an engine in anger.

Period test footage of an American bomber escape capsule, the concept Sukhoi had drawn more than a decade earlier.

Three Ways to Kill an Aeroplane

The Su-17 died of three separate causes, and only the first was about the aircraft.

The wing structure did not work. Designing to TsAGI’s theoretical figures produced a wing that could not be built strongly enough at an acceptable weight, which is a problem that has killed a great many promising aircraft since.

The engine was late. The Lyulka TR-3 was in prolonged development trouble, and an airframe without a working engine is a very expensive model.

And then, in November 1949, Stalin closed the Sukhoi design bureau altogether. Pavel Sukhoi’s team was folded into Tupolev as a subdivision. There was no bureau left to finish the aircraft, no matter how the wing or the engine turned out.

Sukhoi did not get an independent design bureau back until after Stalin died. The team regrouped in 1953 and was renamed OKB-51 in 1954, and went on to produce the Su-7, the Su-27 and everything that followed. But the four years in between cost the bureau an entire generation of aircraft, and the Su-17 was one of them.

A documentary history of Sukhoi, the bureau that spent the early 1950s not existing.

The longer Sukhoi story, from the bureau’s early struggles to the aircraft it is known for.

The Name Came Back

If you search for a Sukhoi Su-17 you will find a variable-geometry fighter-bomber that first flew in 1966, served with a dozen air forces, and is still flying in a few places today. That aircraft has nothing to do with this one beyond three characters of designation.

Soviet designation practice reused numbers freely, and by the 1960s there was no reason to protect a number attached to an aircraft that had never flown and had been shot at on a range. The 1949 Su-17 had been comprehensively forgotten, which is roughly where it remains.

That seems a slightly unfair ending for the first fighter anyone designed with a detachable front end. The idea was right. Everything around it, from the wing to the engine to Soviet politics, was wrong.

Sources: V. B. Shavrov, Istoriia konstruktskii samoletov v SSSR 1938-1950; Bill Gunston, The Osprey Encyclopedia of Russian Aircraft; Antonov, Gordon et al., OKB Sukhoi; Britannica