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Russia Built This Forward-Wing-Sweep Jet Fighter Prototype In the Middle of Falling Apart

The fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent creation of modern Russia was less of a swift, catastrophic implosion and more of a slow, drawn-out, constant state of barely contained chaos for most of the 1990s. That was at least until the rise of the Putin regime. For better, or far more often for worse.
Sukhoi Su-47 13 photos
Photo: Russian State Media
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This only makes the story of the Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut all the more remarkable. It's one of the most peculiar fighter plane prototypes to jump off blueprints and make it to our mortal reality. One with a striking and one-of-a-kind look all its own. This is the story of a Russian fighter-jet concept with bizarre forwardly-swept wings.

The idea of airplane wings that were swept forward instead of straight or backward may not be as futuristic as you think. Though it hardly flew before the end of World War II, the German Junkers Ju-287 was the first airplane to test the working principles of forward-swept wings. Powered by the same Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets as the Messerschmitt Me-262, the Ju-287 proved, if nothing else, that aircraft of this configuration could indeed fly.

This working concept was indirectly refined and improved by the American Grumman Aerospace of Bethpage, New York, with their X-29 research aircraft. With fly-by-wire controls and sophisticated carbon-composite construction, the X-29 took the Ju-287's basic architecture and brought it into the digital information age.

While the Ju-287's wing-sweep was somewhat modest, the X-29's was opposite at a staggering 33 degrees. This profound forward-wing sweep was a trademark feature for the Su-47 as well. It's often speculated that the Sukhoi design bureau was extremely impressed by footage of Grumman's X-29 reported by the press. The results of both projects point to that possibility.

Sukhoi Su\-47
Photo: Russian State Media
Whether Sukhoi borrowed design elements from Grumman or not, the resulting airframe was nothing short of breathtaking. Dubbed the Berkut (Russian for Golden Eagle), the Su-47 stunned Russian citizens and the world at large with its striking looks. At a time when western supercars were at the peak of their ostentatiousness, the Berkut was like a hypercar in the sky.

With dimensions of 22.6 meters long (74 ft 2 in) and a 16.7-meter(54 ft 9 in) wingspan, the Su-47 was on-par in size with NATO twin-engine fighters. Your McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, Grumman F-14 Tomcats, Panavia Tornados, and so forth. Powered by two Soloviev D-30F6 turbofans with 93.1 kN (20,900 lbf) of thrust each, this actually exceeded the 16,610 lbf (73.9 kN) of the thrust of the F-14D's twin General Electric F110s.

It was more than enough power to test whether forward swept wings truly had the benefits of higher lift-to-drag ratios, improved stall speeds, and higher sub-sonic flight range engineers hoped they would. To aid in pursuits of better handling, the Su-47 sported thrust vectoring engine nozzle. These could pivot the engines on an axis into the angle of a tight turn to force the airplane to attack the curve at a more ferocious angle.

At the time, only the still-in-development Lockheed-Martin YF-22 and a few highly experimental research aircraft also boasted this feature. It's still a marquee feature of contemporary fifth-generation fighters that followed the Berkut. Further aerodynamic goodies like a set of canards behind the cockpit and forward of the wings acted like the spoiler on a race car, providing more stability about all the plane's axes.

Sukhoi Su\-47
Photo: Russian State Media
The Su-47's forward wing sweep was rock stable under load and tested up to speeds exceeding Mach 1.5. Though the Berkut's airframe was more than likely capable of Mach two, engineers found the benefits of a forward-wing-sweep were more abundant at the sub-sonic level, so further high-speed tests were not conducted.

If one looks closely at the Berkut from the top down, you'll notice the right rear tail boom is slightly longer than the left one. This is because the left-side boom contained the aircraft's electronic countermeasures (ECM) suite. The right-side tail boom, on the other hand, housed a rear-facing radar. Providing a larger field of vision than a front-facing pulse-doppler radar of the time could on its own.

With all this in mind, it's clear the Su-47 was to be Russia's demonstration that the newly formed Federation could field a fifth-generation fighter in the near future. That's in spite of a stagnating economy, political instability, and a Russian President known mostly in the west for getting drunk with Bill Clinton a few times.

None of this stopped Sukhoi engineers from building a forward-wing-sweep jet fighter prototype that actually ran and drove as advertised. The novel Russian fighter took to the skies for the first time in September 1997. It proved the old Soviet spirit of making do with not very much does, admittedly, have some limited virtue. It was an effort so valiant that much of the Berkut's technology inspired the design of the Sukhoi PAK-FA, now known as the Su-57 (NATO Codename: Felon).

Sukhoi Su\-47
Photo: Project Aces
If only, Vladimir Putin surely wishes that his nation could build more than a handful of these fifth-gen stealth fighters. Of which, none have been confirmed for certain to be spotted over Ukraine. Likely out of fear of them taking an R-27 right to the face by better-trained Ukrainian pilots in their far inferior MiG-29s and Su-27s.

Given the Russian economy's propensity to spontaneous combustion, we can't really blame them for that. Today, you can enjoy flying the Su-47 for yourselves, as a flyable fighter jet in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. 
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