Russia Receiving SU-32/34 Long-Range Strike Fighters

Russia’s SU-27 Flanker design has become one of its great export successes. It is also a design success. Its basic airframe applied lessons from all of America’s “teen series fighters,” producing a 4+ generation aircraft that remains the yardstick by which others still measure themselves. What’s even more impressive is that the design was very flexible, allowing further refinements and modifications that range from the SU-30 and SU-35 upgrades, to versions that add canard foreplanes (SU-30MKI/M, SU-37), and even carrier-launched capability (SU-33).

Then there’s the SU-32/34 “Fullback.” It was envisaged as a Flanker family successor to the F-111 analogue SU-24 “Fencer,” which was very highly regarded in Chechnya as a battlefield support aircraft. Its closest western comparison is the F-15E Strike Eagle, but the Russian design has evolved since its initial drafts in 1986, most visibly so in the present side-by-side cockpit configuration that includes features like an aisle to rest in, and even a toilet of sorts.