When the Sukhoi bureau reopened in 1953 it was set to work on a front-line fighter able to match Western swept-wing jets such as the F-86 Sabre. The result, the S-1 prototype of 1955, was a big, single-engined, sharply swept aircraft built around the powerful Lyulka AL-7. It was genuinely fast, but as an air-superiority fighter it was soon eclipsed by lighter, more agile designs. Rather than abandon it, Sukhoi turned the airframe’s strengths — speed, ruggedness and load — toward ground attack, producing the Su-7B fighter-bomber that entered service at the end of the decade. It was a common Cold-War story: a fighter that found its real career hitting targets on the ground rather than in the air.

The Su-7’s biggest weakness was range. Its single Lyulka AL-7 was powerful but extraordinarily thirsty, and the airframe’s internal fuel could not keep up. In practice the Fitter’s combat radius on a low-level strike mission was frequently only around 200–300 km, and pilots routinely had to hang drop tanks on the underwing pylons — the very stations they would otherwise use for bombs and rockets. A supersonic fighter-bomber that had to choose between fuel and firepower was a hard tool to use well, and the short reach shaped how every operator employed the type. Solving it was one of the main drivers behind the variable-geometry Su-17 that followed.

The Fitter’s high landing speed and long takeoff run were a constant problem for an aircraft supposed to operate from unpaved forward strips. The Su-7BKL variant was Sukhoi’s attempt to help: it added strengthened landing gear (early experiments even fitted skid-style skis alongside the mainwheels for soft ground), larger twin braking parachutes, and provision for rocket-assisted takeoff using jettisonable solid-rocket boosters (SPRD units) to shorten the ground roll. These were work-arounds rather than cures — the real fix, a variable-geometry wing that could sweep forward for slow flight, arrived only with the Su-17.

The Su-7 was a Soviet state product, supplied to the Soviet forces and to allied air arms on political and barter terms rather than sold on an open dollar market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply does not exist in the public record. Estimates in the low single-digit millions of US dollars are sometimes quoted, but these should be read as order-of-magnitude guesses rather than sourced figures. No credible cost-per-flight-hour number exists for the type in open sources either. What is well documented is the operational cost of its thirst: the AL-7’s fuel appetite meant the Su-7 spent much of its payload capacity simply carrying enough fuel to reach and return from a target.