Russian Su-75 Checkmate fighter
Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2021 2:45 pm
Trouble is that Russia will need an active partner to make this aircraft a viable proposition and as India showed by rejecting such a role with the SU-57, the Russians might have some serious issues in finding such a partner.
https://newatlas.com/military/sukhoi-ch ... n-fighter/Sukhoi shows off Checkmate 5th-Gen fighter to compete with F-35
At this year's MAKS-21 air show outside Moscow, Sukhoi unveiled a mock-up of its latest fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Called the Checkmate SU-75, it is designed as an "inexpensive" rival to the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter.
A subsidiary of the United Aircraft Corporation, Sukhoi is developing the Checkmate primarily as an export aircraft to take on the F-35 in the marketplace. For all its advanced capabilities, the F-35 comes with an eye-watering price per plane of US$80 million, so a fighter craft like the Checkmate, with an initial estimated cost of US$30 million, could be attractive to more budget-conscious air forces.
According to Sukhoi, the Checkmate is a stealthy, delta-wing light tactical fighter notable for its canted vertical tails and an internal weapons bay with room for five air-to-air missiles and an auto-cannon. It's also equipped with a multiband passive detection system, improved stealth capability, an electronic warfare system, and an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar, which uses signal emissions across a wider range of frequencies to make detecting the radar signal against background noise more difficult.
Both the OAK and Sukhoi officials state that the airplane should make a first flight in two years and that series production could begin in as soon as four, although most experienced observers state that 5-7 years is a more realistic. Program projections such as these have a tendency to always move to the right — even in countries with more than one generation of experience in designing stealth aircraft.
Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the full-scale production of the Su-75 could be a much longer time in coming — if ever.