Founder of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, the man behind the Su-7, Su-24, and Su-27
Walking home from the gymnasium in Gomel, the boy Pavel saw an airplane cross the sky and his breath caught. He climbed into the attic that same day and began building a model. "It was not a bird — a man was flying above us!"
A Soviet aircraft designer of Belarusian peasant stock who entered aviation as Tupolev's student at the Moscow Technical School. He founded the Sukhoi Design Bureau (OKB-51) in 1939 and delivered the Su-2 light bomber, only to see his bureau liquidated in 1949 after falling from Stalin's favor. Re-established in 1953 after Stalin's death, his OKB produced the backbone of Cold War Soviet tactical aviation: the Su-7 fighter-bomber (the main strike aircraft of the 1960s), the Su-9 and Su-15 interceptors, and the variable-sweep Su-17 and Su-24. Admired by peers for his technical foresight, Sukhoi launched the Su-27 program, which became one of the world's premier fighters. Twice Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Lenin and Stalin Prizes, he served as a Deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet from 1958 to 1974.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1915–1920Entered Moscow Technical School; drafted, served as artillery warrant officer, demobilized
- 1921–1925Resumed studies at MVTU; graduated under Tupolev with fighter-aircraft thesis
- 1925–1938TsAGI / Tupolev KB — contributed to I-4, ANT-25, ANT-37bis; rose to design department deputy chief
- 1939–1949Founded Sukhoi OKB — Su-2 bomber, Su-6 (Stalin Prize), Su-9 early jet fighter
- 1949–1953OKB liquidated by Stalin; deputy chief designer at Tupolev KB
- 1953–1975OKB-51 re-established — Su-7, Su-9, Su-15, Su-17, Su-24; launched Su-27 program
- 1958–1974Deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationAircraft designer
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDesigner of the Su-2 light bomber and Su-6 ground-attack aircraftHis Su-2 equipped 13 regiments at the war's outbreak and saw action in the border battles, the defense of Kiev and Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. In 1943 he received the Stalin Prize 1st class for the Su-6 and donated the entire award to the Defence Fund.
The Last Gamble: Automating the Design Bureau
The least visible of Sukhoi's late judgments concerned not the aircraft themselves but how to compute them. In 1972, well before the heads of other Soviet aviation design bureaus, he petitioned the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences (VTs AN SSSR) for assistance in automating the design of his bureau's products. A group of researchers and programmers was formed in response, and over the following years it developed and put into service the first stage of the corresponding computer-aided design system (SAPR). For a man whose reputation rested on airframe design, this was an early call for an organizational shift in how design itself was done, a separate thread from the lineage of aircraft bearing his name.
In these same years the aftereffects of the lung tuberculosis he had contracted at the front during World War II worsened to the point that he had to use an oxygen cylinder. He died on 15 September 1975 at the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery, plot 7. The automation work was still bearing fruit when his health had already reached its limit.