Sukhoi began flight tests of the 3rd serial Su-35S fighter

Moscow, Jan­u­ary 17. Today the 3rd ser­i­al mul­ti-pur­pose fight­er — Su-35S‑3 pilot­ed by test pilot Taras Art­se­barsky took off the air­field of the Kom­so­mol­sk-on-Amur Air­craft Pro­duc­tion Asso­ci­a­tion named after Yuri Gagarin (KnAAPO).

Var­i­ous modes of propul­sion and inte­grat­ed con­trol sys­tem as well as sta­bil­i­ty and con­trol­la­bil­i­ty char­ac­ter­is­tics were test­ed for more than 2 hours. Oper­a­tion of engines, sys­tems and equip­ment proved to be flawless.

The Su-35 fight­ers have already flown more than 400 flights on the flight tests pro­gram. The first and sec­ond Su-35s were deliv­ered to the 929th State Flight Test Cen­ter (GLITS) for the State Joint Tests (SJT), and on August 15 last year they start­ed to imple­ment the agreed pro­gram. At the same time the first ser­i­al pro­duc­tion fight­er — Su-35S‑1 has also joined the program.

The first and sec­ond Su-35s car­ried out pre­lim­i­nary flight tests. The basic set of flight and tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the on-board equip­ment and the char­ac­ter­is­tics of super maneu­ver­abil­i­ty, sta­bil­i­ty and con­trol char­ac­ter­is­tics, the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pow­er plant, the work of the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem were ful­ly con­firmed dur­ing the tests. The max­i­mum ground-lev­el speed is 1,400 km/h, speed at alti­tude — 2400 km/h, the ceil­ing — 18 thou­sand meters. The detec­tion range of tar­gets in the “air-to-air” mode is over 400 km. This is sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than that of the com­bat air­craft cur­rent­ly in ser­vice. The onboard OLS (opti­cal loca­tor sta­tion) can detect and track mul­ti­ple tar­gets at ranges exceed­ing 80 km. The com­plex is ready to under­go test­ing for oper­a­tional use.

The Su-35 is a thor­ough­ly upgrad­ed super-maneu­ver­able mul­ti-role fight­er of the 4++ gen­er­a­tion. It employs tech­nolo­gies of the fifth gen­er­a­tion that assure its supe­ri­or­i­ty over sim­i­lar class fight­ers. The spe­cial fea­tures of the air­craft include a new avion­ics suite based on dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion con­trol sys­tem inte­grat­ing onboard sys­tems, a new phased anten­na array radar with a long aer­i­al tar­get detec­tion range and with an increased num­ber of simul­ta­ne­ous­ly tracked and engaged tar­gets (30 aer­i­al tar­gets tracked and 8 tar­gets engaged plus the track­ing of 4 and engage­ment of 2 ground tar­gets), and new enhanced vec­tored thrust engines. The Su-35 has a diverse suite of long‑, medi­um- and short-range weapons. It can car­ry guid­ed aer­i­al muni­tions for anti-radar and anti-ship actions as well as gen­er­al pur­pose muni­tions, guid­ed and unguid­ed aer­i­al bombs. The radar sig­na­ture of the fight­er has been reduced by sev­er­al times as com­pared to that of the fourth-gen­er­a­tion air­craft by coat­ing the cock­pit with elec­tro-con­duct­ing com­pounds, apply­ing radio absorp­tion coats and reduc­ing the num­ber of pro­trud­ing sen­sors. The ser­vice life of the air­craft is 6,000 hours flight hours; the life cycle is 30 years of oper­a­tion. The assigned ser­vice life of vec­tored thrust engines is 4,000 hours.