Search Results for: sukhoi

It’s spring here at 41 degrees north latitude, when, as Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) mooned, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” And with apologies to Lord T, I’ll add, “an old pilot’s fancy turns to thoughts of cutting tailwheel furrows in soft verdant earth.” Flight and the lusty quest thereof comprise […]

A Russian-made airliner designed to compete with the top makers of mid-range passenger jets rolled out this week in Irkutsk. The MC-21 will make a first flight in 2017 and start service the following year with Russia’s largest airline, Aeroflot, according to a Seattle Times report. The manufacturer is Irkut, part of a state-supported conglomerate […]

The Pitts Special aerobatic airplane is not for every pilot, of course. Its small stature, dictated by the need to keep things light and strong, means a short fuselage and stubby, relatively highly loaded wings when compared to most other personal airplanes. All of this results in an airplane responsive to the slightest control input, […]

A Russian Sukhoi Su-24 was shot down Tuesday near the Syrian-Turkish border by air-to-air missiles fired by Turkish F-16 fighter jets, officials said. Various accounts have disputed whether the aircraft was above Syrian or Turkish territory at the time, and a U.S. official, speaking off the record to the Los Angeles Times, said if the […]

There has long been a subset of pilots with a certain sense of adventure and the burning desire to own an aerobatic airplane. While most lust after an aerial hotrod such as one of the Extra 300 series or a Sukhoi Su-29, economic reality means putting something a little less impressive into the hangar. In […]

Rapid transportation-that is, anything faster than a galloping horse-hasn’t been with us all that long. Steam locomotives weren’t in widespread use until well into the 19th century, cars came along 70 years later and the airplane a full century after the locomotive. But the timeline for speed evolution in airplanes was almost too rapid to […]

In an ironic turn, nearly 80 years after Stalin derided the Pope of the Catholic Church by asking how many divisions he had, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, now owns one of the most advanced combat jets in the world. After giving workers at a Sukhoi Company plant icons he had […]

As Britains Farnborough Airshow gets underway, aircraft and engine manufacturers as well as suppliers are announcing significant new business. According to Reuters, the highlights include: Airbus launched its new A330neo with U.S. lessor Air Lease Corp as launch customer with a memorandum of understanding for 25 A330-900neo aircraft. Airbus also signed a firm order for […]

Sukhoi is putting the best spin it can on the belly landing of one of its Superjet test aircraft in Iceland on Tuesday. Three pilots and two certification experts were aboard the aircraft during crosswind tests of its autoland system when, according to Sukhoi, the plane”touched the runway with retracted landing gear.” One of the […]

Indonesian investigators say the pilots aboard a Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner that crashed into a mountain last May, killing all 45 on board, were to blame for the crash. They said the crew ignored repeated warnings from the aircraft’s systems of the impending terrain conflicts because they thought the alerts were the result of a […]