In 1977, behind the so strictly guarded iron curtain, one of the world's most extraordinary aircraft made it's maiden flight. The prototype was called T-10 and soon, a western satellite photographed the aircraft at Russia's biggest test facility, Ramenskoye. The western powers knew that a new Russian fighter existed, but it was impossible for them to realize which powers this aircraft possessed. The project was so secret, that even the population of Russia had to wait until the 21:st of July 1985, before national television showed a 10-second clip of the T-10 and thereby admitting to the people that they, without knowing about it, had paid for yet another tool of destruction.
Westerners got their first chance to get a close look at the SU-27 in september 1987. A norwegian P-3 Orion was on a routine recon-mission. Suddenly, two SU-27's came up from behind, acting very aggressively. One of the SU-27's even (more or less by accident) put his fin in one of the P-3's propellers, causing damage to both planes. Photographs of the new plane were taken and NATO decided to dub the aircraft "Flanker". NATO thought that the pictures showed that Russia had come farther than they had anticipated in the field of aircraft production, and so, billions of dollars were pumped into new western projects that could take these fighters on. During the following years, Flankers were seen more and more frequently, often over the Baltic sea as well.
But it was not until the iron curtain was beginning to fall that we could see Flankers were we really wanted to see them. 1989, a couple of SU-27's visited the Paris air show. Here they showed what they really were made to do.
Introducing two manouvers that the world never seen before, they took the world by storm. The two manouvers mentioned are "the cobra" and "the tailslide". The cobra is a manouvre during which the speed of the aircraft drops from 400 to 150 km/h in about 1.5 seconds. It involves a hard pull back on the stick by the pilot at the given speed, which makes the aircraft rise to an angle of 120 degrees. Normal arcraft would start to climb, then stall and fall to the ground with total loss of control just like JAS-39 did over Stockholm some time ago. Instead the SU-27 continues to travel in the same, horizontal direction but as mentioned with the nose pointed 120 degrees away from it's direction of flight! The other manouvre, the tailslide, starts off just like a steep climb would. While travelling straight up, however, the pilot decreases the throttle to a minimum and let's the aircraft stall. After a while, the aircraft stops in mid air and starts to fall back to the ground...Tail first! This is incredible to watch since no western fighters to this date have displayed such tolerance concerning losses of air flow and speed.
While keeping the aircraft under total control, the pilot then turns the nose down while blasting off his afterburners in order to take the aircraft back into it's normal flight envelope.