Su-57 Stealth Fighter: News #6

No it does not.

The pilot flying a Sukhoi plane could have been testing a new feature or the prototype he was flying may have had a fault.

They need to investigate the accident and work out exactly what happened... I would expect a prototype would be fitted with all sorts of equipment to record everything that was going on so it shouldn't be too hard.

If the pilot made a mistake then that information can be put in the manual so other pilots don't make the same mistake... this is a test pilot so that is unlikely in my opinion, but you never know... it is a new plane and they might still be testing the boundaries of its envelope and he might have crossed where he should not have...

Crashes with prototypes and experimental aircraft happen all the time... that is why it is called testing... flight manuals and tactics and procedures need to be developed around what the aircraft can or cannot do and the only way to find what it can or cannot do is to take it to the edge and a little over... an expert pilot like a test pilot is who you use because often they can recover from situations your average pilot cannot so he is the ideal person to explore the envelope.

Unless it is a fundamental design problem i doubt it will effect anything at all... for all we know this might be an early prototype that is quite different from the early production models they will be sending to testing and development units that create manuals and develop tactics.

This was the first production model. Delays in the program will definitely be considerable. During this time, the US will introduce another 200 F-35.

Arrow wrote:This was the first production model. Delays in the program will definitely be considerable. During this time, the US will introduce another 200 F-35.

Indeed. Not to mention funding has already dried up for RF’s armed forces since the crippling sanctions by US and allies. Such a crash will be a significant blow to the aircraft’s reputation right? Meanwhile if a similar crash happened to an F-22 or F-35 its not a big deal because they churn up hundreds of F-35s per year? Is this the correct logic?

And that is the point... of course there needs to be a delay to see what happened... this is Russia, not the US where they just declare everything is OK and keep mass producing an aircraft with almost 1,000 known problems including potentially fatal ones involving the oxygen system that allows the pilot to breathe...

But they will make their 3,500 F-35s no matter how many pilots they have to kill because image is everything.

Apparently it was a control system failure.

https://www.ruaviation.com/news/2019/12/24/14490/

So you are wrong AGAIN... and never seem to get tired of being wrong..
It was a serial production model... This means the worse possible thing happened.
Now The Su-57 program will be delayed .. probably for at least 1 year.. being generous..
it could be more 2 or 3 years if was using the final engine !!..

You seem to not understand how product development works... there has never been a plane like the Su-57 build before... it is new... so they have to test it and check things to make sure their plans and design actually work in reality the way they expect and hope they will work.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of components and systems that all have to work and interact together in the final product and there is actually no way to be sure that any design is good enough till something bad happens... how many years was Concord in operation before they found out the hard way that placing fuel tanks where shredded tire material can rupture them if they fail is a bad idea...

Looking back now it seems obvious, but no one said anything.

The fact is that finding a problem now before they start serial production is the best possible result they could realistically hope for.

Compare with the F-35 programme where literally hundreds of problems have been found but not solved because the pressure is to get it into mass production to try to drive the purchase price down... problems including potentially fatal problems with the oxygen generation system which effects most of their new jet fighters... and they don't seem to have any realistic or practical solutions... that is really serious...

IT remains to be seen what engine the plane was using if the final one or the temporary old one
they modified from a fourth generation sukhoy Su-27/30

Ahhh get over yourself... the engine they are using is a good engine... the new more powerful engine is a bit more ambitious and is really intended as an upgrade some years after the aircraft enters service to boost performance at a time when most planes tend to get heavier and lose their flight performance edge because there is no engine power boost that can be applied easily enough to balance the weight increase.

The F-14A had terrible engines in comparison... they were bloody awful... they were not intended for a fighter aircraft for use in dogfights... it wasn't till the 1990s when the F-14D got its new engines it actually became a decent aircraft but they had already decided to replace it with the F-18 which was supposed to be cheaper and multirole but ended up being much more expensive...

Is not a big deal for me.. the real big thing for Russia airforce will be Mig-41 ,which will be
the most valuable player in a full scale war vs NATO.. Mig-41 , Tu-160m modernized and Pak-DA
are the big planes ,that more impact will do in a war.. ie. the nuclear carriers of long range hypersonic missiles..

The Su-57 with its current engine is a serious step up from the Su-35 and should be better than the F-22 in most areas... with its upgraded engine it will be even better. What is there to be upset about?

The Russian Air Force will benefit from having a range of aircraft... Su-57, Su-35, MiG-35, each have different cost and performance niches offering different capabilities that will be useful and used without costing anything like what a single F-35 costs to buy or to operate.

American taxpayers would be so jealous if they understood and were given accurate information about the current situation... but they are kept in the dark... to prevent outrage and riots.

It is actually irrelevant. Russia's counter to NATO numerical and technological superiority is its counter-strike capability, both conventional and more importantly nuclear. The U.S. was not even keen to take on North Korea with its very limited capability.

Exactly... the Su-57 is not supposed to be the cheap numbers plane that replaces all other fighters in the Russian inventory and is intended to face off against 3.500 NATO F-35s. Russia actually has a working fully operational integrated air defence network and a force of Su-57s will form the stealthy fighter component of that force that will use radars and other sensors and aircraft and satellites etc etc to deal with any external threats... even if you offered to give them free of charge right now 3,500 Su-57s I doubt they would accept because they would have no peace time use for such numbers let alone the resources and infrastructure to support or operate such a force...

Paradoxically, the weaker Russia's airforce and SAM network is the less time its decision makers have to decide to launch counter-strikes and the more dangerous any confrontation becomes for NATO/US.

The Air Force is weaker in terms of air power strength, but the Russian SAM network is head and shoulders better than all of NATOs air defences combined.... the only component of NATO air defence that even comes close is on their AEGIS class ships and even then they are not as good.

if it was brand new off then line then this will raise a ton of questions.

Questions, sure, but no reason to get your panties in a bunch and start crying and cancelling orders and delaying everything ten years while managers are publicly executed...

Why did it fail, is their QA and preflight not sufficient. What about the subsystem manufacturers. Was it a software, hardware, actuator or structural failure? Once you establish that, then WHY!!! ...never easy. Hopefully the answer is clear.

Well that is part of the procedure of any investigation, and solutions will be found and applied and the in service serial aircraft will be the better for this.

Imagine if all 76 were delivered before this problem occurred and not only would they all need to be grounded... which would effect operations and other processes like tactics and manual development, but any changes would probably require all those planes to have modifications and changes made to new production aircraft too... expensive and time consuming and embarrassing.

Fixing it now is much easier and cheaper even if there is a delay while they make a replacement aircraft and modify those others already made.

Always had happened. Just look through accidents of aircraft in the past. Nearly all of them have failures within first year of either introduction or before introduction. As KVS said, there is no such thing as a perfect design and or perfect use without failure.

To take it further for those that don't understand, when you are product testing you use the product in sensible ways... the way it is designed to be used by people trained to use it. But you also have to test it for people making mistakes... to find problems in the way things are done to see if you can create a fail situation... that is the point of testing... to make the product as error preventative as possible.

I mean look at a door... you can put a nice big handle bar on it but then you introduce doubt... a handle can be used to push or pull, so you either have a sign saying push or pull or you make every door with this handle a push and a pull door.

That is not always possible, but there are elegant solutions... if the door is push only just put a push plate on it with no sign. Any human being will realise all they can do is push so they don't need to be told whether to push or pull... If a handle is fitted however they might try to pull and only after it not opening will they realise it is a push only door.

The push plate is simple, does not require instructions, and actually prevents the user trying to perform an ineffective action that will waste their time and energy.

Deciding whether to fit push plates or handles is another matter however... where is the door?

Will the door need to be held open, are the users of the door in need of a handle or will a push plate do?

These are design considerations designers have to decide on... another example is a roundabout or a set of lights... both control traffic, but lights require power and maintenance and can be damaged in accidents or vandalised. A round about is another elegant solution... once you understand how it works it is simple and easy to use. Some idiots can make it a problem but most of the time if there is space it is the better solution to traffic problems.

The problem with a multirole modern fighter is that there are probably millions of different combinations of equipment settings and combinations of things you might try to do... you really can't test them all in honesty... so you check the main things... perhaps something failed because of this which makes it a good catch because if a test pilot couldn't recover the aircraft then an active pilot learning to use this aircraft probably wouldn't either.