SU-37 Terminator
The Sukhoi Su-37 "Terminator" — the thrust-vectoring tech demonstrator that performed the Super Cobra at Farnborough in 1996 — captured as an RC EDF scale model.
About
The Sukhoi Su-37 "Terminator" was a 1990s tech-demonstrator evolved from the Su-27M/Su-35 lineage, built to showcase extreme agility and advanced avionics in the Sukhoi fighter family. Engineers installed thrust-vectoring engines — initially temporary units, later replaced with AL-37FU thrust-vectoring AL-31F derivatives — on the eleventh Su-27 (factory code T10M-11), which had been built by the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Production Association in Russia's Far East as a radar test bed. After ground checks at the Gromov Flight Research Institute, the aircraft made its maiden flight on April 2, 1996, from Zhukovsky Airfield outside Moscow, piloted by Yevgeni Frolov.
Funding for the Su-37 program had to be raised privately by Sukhoi after the Russian Air Force declined to support the project; according to the company, revenue from Su-27 export sales to China and Vietnam was channeled into the Su-37 work. The thrust-vectoring nozzles could deflect 15 degrees up or down in the pitch axis, together or differentially, and the aircraft's supermaneuverability allowed pilots to develop new combat tactics that exploited high-alpha post-stall flight regimes.
Among the new maneuvers was the Super Cobra — a variation of the Pugachev Cobra in which the aircraft pitched up 180 degrees and maintained the tail-first position momentarily, theoretically allowing the aircraft to fire a missile at a combat opponent during the maneuver. Frolov demonstrated the Super Cobra at the aircraft's international debut at the Farnborough Air Show in September 1996. Only one Su-37 was ever built, but the program helped develop technologies later used in the production Su-35 fourth-generation fighter.
In the simulator
A demanding modern-fighter EDF scale subject. The Su-37 in our sim has the kind of agile, responsive handling expected of a Sukhoi fighter — substantial inertia, twin-engine throttle coordination, and the visual presence of the most maneuverable Russian fighter of its era. Use it for jet pattern flying with modern-fighter aesthetics. A natural sibling of the Sukhoi-S37-Berkut in this same pack — two contemporary Sukhoi tech-demonstrators.
