The Su-24 is often called the Eastern counterpart of the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, and the comparison is a fair one. Both were designed for the same mission — penetrate hostile airspace at very low level, in any weather, and strike deep behind the front — and both bureaus arrived at strikingly similar answers: a variable-geometry “swing” wing, a two-seat side-by-side cockpit and a terrain-following radar. The Fencer is smaller and lighter than the F-111 and never matched the American jet’s range, but it filled the same doctrinal slot in Soviet service. The convergence was less imitation than two engineering teams solving an identical problem with the physics of the day.

The heart of the Fencer is its PNS-24 nav-attack system and terrain-following radar, often identified with the Orion-A attack radar and a Relief terrain-following channel. Engaged in automatic mode, it flew the aircraft along a pre-planned route at very low altitude, rising and falling with the ground beneath it, in weather that would have grounded earlier Soviet strike aircraft. For the crew it demanded a particular kind of nerve: trusting a 1970s computer to fly them at high speed a few dozen metres above the terrain, at night, without seeing it. That capability, not raw speed, is what made the Su-24 a genuine leap for Soviet aviation.

On 24 November 2015 a Russian Su-24M was shot down by a Turkish F-16 near the Syria–Turkey border. Turkey said the aircraft had crossed into its airspace for a matter of seconds and ignored repeated warnings; Russia disputed that account and said the jet never left Syrian airspace. The pilot, Lt-Col Oleg Peshkov, was killed after ejecting; the navigator, Konstantin Murakhtin, was recovered in a rescue operation in which a Russian marine also died. The incident became one of the most serious direct NATO–Russia confrontations of the Syrian war and led to a prolonged rupture in Russian–Turkish relations. The facts of the airspace crossing remain contested between the two governments.

Like most Soviet military aircraft, the Su-24 was a state product rather than an item sold on an open dollar market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply does not exist in the public record. Export deals for the Su-24MK in the 1980s and 1990s were bundled, barter-laden and rarely disclosed. No credible cost-per-flight-hour figure exists in open sources either. Any precise dollar number attached to a Fencer should be read as an estimate, not a sourced fact.