Steve Trimble In a global market awash in fighter options, Russia thinks it’s delivered an elusive winner.
Steve Trimble
The Sukhoi LTA program is on a rapid schedule, with a first flight planned for 2023. Credit: Piotr Butowski
A new Russian fighter program will seek to conquer the foreign market for a fast tactical aircraft with advanced electronics, stealthy features and bargain pricing.
The Russian media has published a few details of Sukhoi’s Light Tactical Aircraft (LTA) since last December, but not the full scope of the single-engine fighter’s novel design and ambitious export-driven business case.
First flight scheduled in 2023
Launch customer not identified
A blustery one-week marketing blitz leading up to the opening day of the MAKS Air Show outside Moscow on July 20 branded the LTA program as the “Checkmate” solution in a global market now awash in developmental fighter projects.
After providing Russian President Vladimir Putin a personal tour of the Checkmate pavilion at the MAKS exhibit grounds, Russian defense and industry officials tried to be confidently specific and cautiously vague about the project at the same time.
The Sukhoi LTA program already boasts a foreign “anchor customer,” Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told Russian media on July 20. The identity of the customer and the extent of its financial commitment were not released.
A swarm of executives from Sukhoi parent United Aircraft Corp. (UAC) and majority shareholder Rostec detailed the LTA program’s unusually fast-paced, digitally enabled development schedule, with a first flight planned in 2023 and series production starting by 2026. But executives disclosed neither the costs of the development program nor the source of the project’s funding, according to Russian media.
The Sukhoi LTA’s competitors are backed by their national governments. South Korea’s KF-21, Turkey’s TF-X and China’s J-35 will each enter service in their national air forces. The same is true for more advanced, sixth-generation fighter designs being developed by Europe, Japan and the U.S.
The status of the LTA program in Russia’s air force is unclear. Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, says such a platform could provide the Russian Air Force with mass lost due to the large-scale retirements of fighters after the Cold War. But he questioned where this would leave the Russian Aircraft Corp. subsidiary MiG’s own MiG-29 and MiG-35 programs.
Sergei Chemezov, Rostec’s chief executive, told journalists that “of course” the Russian Air Force would buy the new Sukhoi fighter. But the Russian military has eschewed single-engine fighter designs since the mid-1980s, and the latest five-year state armaments plan includes no funding for a light fighter.
The export market is the more likely option for the LTA. Russia’s network of MiG-29 operators in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America provides a solid base of potential customers. Chemezov estimated a global market for 300 LTA orders over the next 15 years.
However, export-oriented fighter programs have a poor track record. The Northrop F-5 may seem to be the exception, but that 60-year-old design shared a high level of commonality with the U.S. Air Force’s T-38 trainer. The experience of the Northrop F-20 and the Textron AirLand Scorpion projects is more typical, with foreign customers doubtful of a product that is not wanted by its own government.
In the absence of government investment, UAC seems to be an unlikely financier for a speculative development product likely to cost trillions of rubles to bring to market. In May, Borisov said in an interview with the TASS news agency that UAC had the highest debt load among Russia’s defense companies, which had amassed more than 3 trillion rubles ($40.6 billion) in collective debt through 2020.
The debt situation makes the matter of UAC’s future in the lucrative fighter market more urgent. U.S. government-imposed sanctions have crippled sales of the Su-35, Russia’s flagship export fighter. Indonesia signed a contract for 24 Su-35s in 2018, but government officials have refused to schedule a delivery date. Russian media touted the delivery of the first five Su-35s ordered by Egypt in August 2020, but the supposedly delivered aircraft have not been photographed outside of Novosibirsk in Central Russia since that time. The export version of the Su-57, which Sukhoi showed off to Turkish President Recep Erdogan at MAKS two years ago, also has failed to attract orders outside Russia.
Development of the LTA represents Russia’s growing interest in exports and collaborative development as well as growing concerns of Chinese encroachment on fighter markets that Russia previously dominated through sales of the Sino-Pakistani JF-17 Thunder or the Chengdu J-10, says Justin Bronk, a research fellow for airpower and technology at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
“China has not had a huge amount of success yet,” he says. “But if you look at the J-10C, it sits alongside the MiG-29 as a cheap and cheerful multi-role medium-weight fighter. And it is only going to get better.”
Much will depend on whether the LTA will be adopted by the Russian armed forces, which would allow the platform to gain the “operated by Russia label” that could induce export sales, Bronk adds.
For his part, Putin toured the Checkmate pavilion on the MAKS exhibit ground but ignored the LTA project in his opening address at the air show.
On paper, the LTA fills a notable gap in the market for a fighter with modern sensors and high performance—not to mention costs that are nearly one-third the price of Western alternatives. Sukhoi designed the LTA to achieve a cost per flight hour seven times less than the Lockheed Martin F-35A, according to a TASS interview with Mikhail Strelets, LTA’s chief designer at Sukhoi. That implies a cost per flight hour of about $5,500 for the aircraft.
According to Sukhoi’s marketing materials, the LTA is a highly modular design. The single-seat aircraft configuration displayed in the Checkmate pavilion is merely a baseline. Customers can order the aircraft with a single seat, two seats or unmanned, Strelets told TASS. The Russian electronics can be replaced by customers that prefer their own or different equipment, he added.
The modularity is possible due to Sukhoi’s digitally driven design process and open-architecture-systems philosophy for the LTA, according to Strelets.
“In fact, it is the first Russian aircraft to be fully digitally designed,” Strelets said in the TASS interview. “This significantly reduced development time and technical risks during testing.”
The engine and fully movable, canted vertical tails appear borrowed from Russia’s Su-57. Credit: Piotr Butowski
The LTA also borrows heavily from Sukhoi’s experience on the Su-57. The wing, engine and fully movable, canted vertical tails of the LTA appear borrowed from Sukhoi’s twin-engine, stealthy flagship fighter. Internally, the LTA may benefit from export versions of the Su-57’s Himalaya electronic warfare system and Byelka active, electronically scanned array radar.
The balanced stealthy philosophy that Sukhoi applied to the Su-57 also appears to translate to the LTA. But the sharp edges of the bifurcated ventral air intake may not yield the most stealthy profile on the LTA. Nonetheless, three weapons bays will carry up to five air-to-air missiles internally, including two short-range R-73s and three medium-range R-77s.
Despite the similarities, Russia’s industry hopes the LTA will diverge from the Su-57 experience in another way: Since the Su-57 was selected by the Russian Air Force to enter development in 2002, Sukhoi has delivered only a single operational fighter to the type’s sole customer.
—With Tony Osborne in London
