The Moscow-based design bureau developed the USSR’s first vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) enabled fighter jet, the Yak-38, in the 1970s. The Yak-38’s successor, the Yak-141 program, reached an advanced stage of development, but was cancelled on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

Russian aircraft designer and manufacturer Yakovlev is ready to resume the development of a fifth-generation VTOL capable aircraft, if asked to do so by the Defense Ministry, Yakovlev general director Andrei Boginsky told Sputnik.

“Our designers have explored the prospects for creating even more advanced aircraft corresponding to the level of the fifth generation of combat aviation,” Boginsky said. “The topic of vertical take-off and landing aircraft was frozen in the difficult 1990s, but we have retained the scientific and technical basis” for their development.

The retention of this knowledge, combined “with new aviation technologies, will allow us to quickly return to the creation of vertical take-off and landing aircraft, if the Russian Ministry of Defense were to entrust us with this task,” Boginsky added, emphasizing that Yakovlev is the only Russian military aircraft manufacturer with the relevant experience creating VTOL aircraft.