Very nice detail. Yes it is a good looking Aircraft, But IMO far from the bast out there.

The best aircraft short of the F-22, in the most modern version. :p

At least unless the JSF turns out not to be the farce it seems right now.

While the F22 can wax one with out trying, I was thinking more along the lines of a Tom Cat myself.

A Su-27 would bag a Tomcat any day. It turns tighter, has heavier armament, has almost equal top speed (without need for limiting swing wings), higher ceiling and climb rate, it has a better Radar system (Which the russians claim can actually spot the F-22 at certain angles at meaningful distances), and off-boresight launch capabillity for the missles coupled with the helmet mounted sight make it almost unfairly superior at close quarters against the F-14.

:v The F-14 may have been cool, but it´s more in the same generation as the Mig-23, which was phased out by the russian air force in the 90s. What it does have going for it though is the bonus of having a WSO.

Also, I´m a little biased towards the Su-27, but I´d still say that a cat won´t stand a chance :p

Concider that in every face to face ( Air to air ) meeting of them, the tome cat win and comes home, make one wonder, It nt always the bird, but the team in the bird that makes the diffrence. And I can say first hand that I have seen first hand a AH 64 D take 2 SU 27 out before they even had a change to sneek up.

I think you´re talking about the F-15, since Iran lost F-14s in the Iran-Iraq war. And it´s true 65 % of the fight is the pilot. However, the only country that I´m aware of using the Su-27 in open conflict was Ethiopia, in the Ethiopian-Eritrean war, where Su-27s shot down several Mig-29s without losses to themselves.

And I doubt that an AH-64 can take on a Sukhoi, unless the jet pilot does something extraordinarily stupid. The longest ranged missle the helo can carry is the sidewinder, with a range of 16 kilometers. The Russian counterpart, the R-73, has double that range. And that´s only the short ranged missles. Contrary to western missles, the russians equip even their long-range missles with a mix of IR and Radar seekers, so even if the helo is hiding stationarily (and thus is invisible to older types of radar) it can still be found and destroyed by using the IRST and Heat-seeking missles.

For the combat record, so far the Su-27s is as good as that of the F-15. No losses to several successful kills.