A bureau Stalin did not want

Pavel Sukhoi was a quiet man. Born in 1895 to Belarusian peasants, he trained under Andrei Tupolev, worked on the record-breaking ANT-25 and the TB-3 bomber, and in 1939 was given his own design bureau, set up first in Kharkiv and moved to the Moscow region in 1940. His first aircraft, the Su-2 reconnaissance bomber, was built about 910 times. His second, the Su-6 ground-attack aircraft, was judged by some to be better than Ilyushin’s Il-2 and won him a Stalin Prize in 1943. Yet it was never mass-produced. Stalin preferred the Il-2, and by 1942 Sukhoi’s bureau had no production line at all.

Back from the dead in 1953

In 1949 the dictator’s patience ran out. Sukhoi fell from favour, his bureau was dissolved, and he was sent back to work for Tupolev as a deputy chief designer. For four years the name disappeared. Then Stalin died in 1953, and Sukhoi was allowed to start again. He did so with remarkable speed. The Su-7 fighter-bomber flew in September 1955 and the Su-9 interceptor in June 1956. In September 1959 a modified Su-9, the T-431, set a world absolute altitude record of 28,852 metres, flown by test pilot Vladimir Ilyushin, son of the very designer whose Il-2 had beaten Sukhoi during the war.

Swing wings and Mach 3 dreams

The 1960s were bold. The Su-15 interceptor, flown in 1962, would become notorious: in 1983 a Su-15TM from Sakhalin shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 on board. The Su-17 became the first variable-sweep aircraft in Soviet service, and the family ran to 2,867 aircraft. The swing-wing Su-24 bomber followed. Most audacious of all was the T-4, nicknamed Sotka, a titanium Mach 3 bomber that flew in August 1972 and produced nearly 600 patents before it was scrapped in 1975. Its single surviving airframe sits at Monino. Meanwhile the rugged Su-25, first flown in 1975, became the Soviet Union’s flying tank.

The Flanker

The last fighter Pavel Sukhoi designed was the T-10, and he did not live to see it fly. He died in September 1975; the prototype flew on 20 May 1977. It disappointed, and under Mikhail Simonov the design was almost completely reworked into the T-10S. The result, the Su-27, was the Soviet answer to the F-15, and then some. A stripped-down version, the P-42, took climb records from the American Streak Eagle, and at the 1989 Paris Air Show test pilot Viktor Pugachev pulled the jet up past the vertical and back again in level flight. The world called it Pugachev’s Cobra.

Selling to survive

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the money for new fighters vanished. Sukhoi survived by selling the Su-27 family abroad, with Simonov coordinating sales that brought in vital revenue. China bought Su-27s and went on to build its own J-11. India took the two-seat Su-30MKI and in 2000 signed a deal for 140 to be licence-built by HAL at Nashik. From that one airframe came a whole tribe: the Su-30, the carrier-borne Su-33 that made the first conventional Russian carrier landing in 1989, the side-by-side Su-34 strike jet and the thrust-vectoring Su-35S. Together they kept the bureau alive.

Superjets, stealth and a merger

Under Mikhail Pogosyan, general director from 1999, Sukhoi tried to break into airliners with the Superjet 100, which first flew in May 2008. Two fatal crashes, at Mount Salak in Indonesia in 2012 and Moscow in 2019, darkened its record, and in 2018 the civil arm passed to Irkut, later renamed Yakovlev. The stealthy Su-57 first flew in January 2010 and entered production in 2019. In 2006 Sukhoi became part of the state-controlled United Aircraft Corporation, and on 1 June 2022 its legal entity was folded into UAC altogether. The brand and the design school carry on.

Fabrieken

• Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant (KnAAPO) · Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khabarovsk Krai — Builds Su-35 and Su-57; about 13,500 staff in 2011
• Novosibirsk Aircraft Production Association (NAPO) · Novosibirsk — Built the Su-24; builds the Su-34
• Design bureau headquarters · Begovoy District, Moscow — Damaged by fire in June 2024

Mensen

• Pavel Sukhoi · founder and chief designer, 1895–1975 — Twice Hero of Socialist Labour; Stalin Prize 1943, Lenin Prize 1968
• Mikhail Simonov · designer, 1929–2011 — Joined in 1970; led the Su-27 redesign and its post-Soviet export sales
• Mikhail Pogosyan · general director from 1999 — Later head of UAC, 2011–2015
• Vladimir Ilyushin · test pilot — Flew the T-431 record, the S-22I, the T-6 and the T-4
• Viktor Pugachev · test pilot — Cobra manoeuvre, Paris 1989; first conventional Russian carrier landing, 1989

Records en primeurs

• World absolute altitude record, 28,852 m, T-431 (modified Su-9), 4 September 1959
• Two altitude records (1959, 1962) and two speed records (1960, 1962) in Pavel Sukhoi’s lifetime
• P-42 (stripped Su-27) climb records, 1986–1988, taken from the F-15 Streak Eagle
• Su-17: first variable-sweep aircraft in Soviet service
• Su-33: first conventional landing on a Russian carrier, 1 November 1989