| Scathing. |
Oh-hoho… you know me by now, all my esteemed 3.89 readers, don’t you?
You see: on paper – or on the glowing screen of your monitor – the Sukhoi Su-57 (ASCC/NATO-reporting name ‘Felon’, so suitable for the times of IQ47) is everything an aviation enthusiast could dream of. With its clean, sleek lines and three-dimensional thrust vectoring – and even more so, if one takes a look at its plan-view – it looks like it was designed by a committee of sci-fi concept artists. It’s the kind of jet that looks fast even when it’s parked on a tarmac, radiating a predatory menace that makes the ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ F-22 and F-35 look like they were designed by accountants.
However, beauty is only skin deep. Peel back that polyurethane-based paint job – because, let’s be honest: there is no radar-absorbent coating on the Su-57 at all – and you won’t find a cutting-edge aerospace marvel. You’ll find a monument to Russian industrial decay, megalomania, and a procurement system so corrupt it makes a banana republic looks like Switzerland.
And no, no amount of hysterical announcements about export success is ever going to change that reality. To understand why, though... sorry: we’re going to have to do some heavy lifting.
