Dubai Airshow: Russia's new checkmate fighter

A surprise star of this year’s Dubai Airshow is Russia’s new Checkmate fighter.

First unveiled at the MAKS 2021 air salon in Moscow in July, Checkmate is something of an enigma.

Appearing straight out of left field, with little warning and no obvious requirement, the aircraft shown at Moscow was clearly a mock-up, albeit one which used major sub-assemblies from an existing Sukhoi Su-57 airframe.

This was, in itself, surprising, since with modern design and manufacturing techniques, building a new airframe is relatively cheap, and using the wing, nose and tailfins from a much larger existing fighter would seem likely to impose significant weight and drag penalties. This led many analysts to question whether the Checkmate was a real but nascent combat aircraft, or whether it was little more than a heavily hyped publicity stunt, rolled out for a domestic audience?

The aircraft’s appearance at Dubai would tend to suggest that it is, indeed, the mock-up of a real design, intended as a low-cost alternative to the Su-57 for export customers, and perhaps as a useful adjunct to that aircraft for the Russian Aerospace Forces, sacrificing combat radius and payload for significantly lower operating costs.

The Sukhoi Checkmate uses a single-engined configuration and technology from the Su-57 and Su-35, coupled with advanced model-based computer-driven design and manufacturing techniques, in order to drive down costs.

In some respects this makes the Checkmate a spiritual successor to aircraft like the MiG-21, MiG-23 and Su-17/20/22 family, and for the Russian aerospace industry it marks a return to the single-engined fighter configuration for the first time in more than 40 years.

Rostec and its subsidiary, the United Aircraft Corporation (Sukhoi’s parent company), said that the new aircraft was a new light tactical fighter that had been developed as a private venture, at the company’s own initiative, “without federal budget funds”.

It was also said to be a Russian domestic programme, although Yuri Slyusur, head of the United Aircraft Corporation, said that framework design requirements had been “guided by the various requirements of our foreign partners”, and hinted at the possibility of international cooperation and technology transfer.

Teaser videos and other pre-launch marketing efforts hinted that key sales targets for the Checkmate were the UAE, India, Vietnam, and Argentina, and there has been speculation that the aircraft is in some way related to the contract signed between Russia and the UAE in 2017.