Sukhoi Su-35

Sukhoi · Russia · first flew 2008 · fighter

A heavily modernised single-seat Flanker (NATO Flanker-E/M) with thrust-vectoring engines and a powerful radar, marketed as Russia's top non-stealth fighter.

Recognition (WEFT)

W — Wings	Mid-mounted, swept
E — Engines	2 × turbofan, fuselage-mounted
F — Fuselage	21.9 m fuselage
T — Tail	Twin fin

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Spot it by:

Single-seat twin-finned Flanker silhouette
Two large thrust-vectoring engines spaced wide apart
Swept wings with prominent leading-edge root extensions

Essentially a refined single-seat Flanker — count two splayed engines and twin canted fins, and note the cleaner nose and lack of canards compared with the Su-30MKI.

Specifications

The Sukhoi Su-35 has a length of 21.9 m (72 ft).
It has a wingspan of 15.3 m (50 ft).
Its maximum speed is 2390 km/h (1485 mph).
Typical crew: 1.

Figures are for the representative variant described above; marks differ. See how AircraftIQ sources figures.

History

The current Su-35S, internally the Su-35BM, first flew in 2008 as a deep modernisation of the Su-27 airframe with new avionics, an Irbis-E radar and AL-41F1S engines. It entered Russian service in the 2010s and has been exported to China.

Variants

The principal version is the Su-35S for Russia; an earlier 1980s-90s canard-equipped aircraft also carried the Su-35 designation.

Where you'll see it

An operational Russian and Chinese fighter with no UK basing, so not seen on the British front line; encounters are limited to overseas operators.

In depth

The Su-35 is best understood as the ultimate expression of a single, extraordinarily successful airframe rather than a new aircraft. The original Su-27 Flanker, designed in the Soviet era to match the American F-15, gave the family its defining shape: a blended wing and body where the fuselage itself generates lift, twin engines spaced widely apart with a distinctive tunnel between them, and a graceful, almost cobra-like profile. That blended layout is why a Flanker can perform the famous Pugachev's Cobra manoeuvre, rearing up past the vertical while still flying forward, a party trick that the thrust-vectoring nozzles of the modern Su-35S turn into genuine post-stall controllability. Those nozzles, which can swivel to point the engine thrust, are the single biggest technical leap over the older Flankers and allow the aircraft to keep manoeuvring at speeds and angles where aerodynamic controls alone would have given up.

The modernisation ran deeper than the engines. Sukhoi stripped weight from the airframe, strengthened it for a longer service life, and deleted the canard foreplanes and the retractable inflight-refuelling probe housing that cluttered some earlier Flanker developments, giving the Su-35S a cleaner nose. Inside went the Irbis-E passive electronically scanned array radar, a powerful set claimed to detect fighter-sized targets at long range and to track many at once, and a glass cockpit replacing the dense analogue dials of Soviet-era jets. The result was marketed as the most capable fighter Russia could field short of the stealthy Su-57, a so-called 4++ generation aircraft meant to bridge the gap until fifth-generation types matured.

In service the Su-35S entered the Russian aerospace forces in the 2010s and was deployed to Syria, where it flew air-superiority patrols, and it has since been used extensively in the war in Ukraine, where losses have been reported on both sides of the intelligence picture. Its principal export success has been China, which took delivery of a batch and folded them into its own increasingly capable fleet, and there have been on-and-off negotiations with other operators over the years. Its rivals are the Western fighters it was conceived to counter, above all the F-15 and the Eurofighter Typhoon in the non-stealth arena, and increasingly the stealthy F-35, against which the Su-35's reliance on raw performance and a big radar rather than low observability shows the generational line it sits just behind.

For a British or Western spotter the Su-35 is effectively unseeable on home turf, since no NATO country operates it and it does not visit Western airshows; the closest most enthusiasts will get is footage from the MAKS air show at Zhukovsky near Moscow, where Russian display pilots have wrung the aircraft through jaw-dropping tailslides and cobras that show off the vectored thrust. Encounters otherwise come only through the operators, Russia and China, or through intercept photographs taken by NATO air forces meeting them over international waters. A hard-won recognition tip: the surest way to separate an Su-35 from the many other Flanker variants is the combination of a clean nose with no canards, the paddle-like thrust-vectoring nozzles that on close inspection are cut at an angle and toe slightly outward, and a pair of tall twin fins without the wingtip launch rails carried by some earlier marks. It is, in the end, a Flanker refined to its sharpest point, and the family resemblance is unmistakable the moment you see that broad, lifting body from below.

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