Looking cool is most of the battle

I'm not sure there's a cooler looking plane than the Russian Berkut, the reverse-winged aircraft whose fictional cousin (from Ace Combat) is above.*

In real life, the plane was a '90s era experimental testbed, demonstrating the potential for forward swept wings. (And other systems, but we'll focus on the wings.)

One of the ideas in putting a jet's wings backwards, so to speak, is that you are able to increase the maneuverability (mostly at low speed) while not penalized high speed performance. That combination has historically been important in a dogfight and, occasionally, in air attack regimes as well.

One difficulty designers of supersonic aircraft have always had to confront was the fact that going fast and making really hard turns suggests two different solutions. To give kind of gross example of what I'm talking about, consider the F-104 Starfighter - in my mind of the coolest Cold War aircraft ever - and the A-10A (now A-10C) Warthog - oh excuse me, the official name is Lightning II. (Also an extremely cool aircraft.)

The Starfighter is svelte and skinny, with tiny wings. It goes very fast - in a straight line. It turns - let's just say you dial that turn in way before you make it.

The Hog is ugly** for a lot of reasons. Its long straight wings aren't part of that, I don't think, but they sure do make the plane look like a throwback. No jet aircraft had had straight wings since the very early days of development during and just after WWII.

But those wings are one reason the Hog is such a maneuverable aircraft at slow speeds. The A-10 truly is stick and rudder beast, as close to a gymnast in the sky as you'll see. (And brother, you do NOT want to be in front of her when that cannon starts turning.)

Designers have tried to reconcile the problem of speed and maneuverability through all flight regimes in a variety of ways. In the 1970s, American engineers started playing with this puppy, the X-29:

That is one seriously weird and beautiful aircraft.

At least in theory, forward-swept wings would solve a good portion of the speed/maneuverability equation. But like everything else in aerodynamics, they come with their own set of peculiarities. The primary one is that as both speed and maneuverability increase, separately or together, the amount of force exerted on the aircraft increases. And forward swept wings generate, at least in most configurations that I've seen, even more force than the more conventional choices.

You can fight those forces in a number of ways - strengthening the wings, for example - but you pay a price for those fixes. If you make the wings stronger, you make the plane heavier. If you add more control surfaces, for example, you add complexity. (Both strategies were part of the forward-swept wing equation.)

It was thought in the '70s and '80s that new lightweight and incredible strong materials, along with computerized controls, would solve the problem. They didn't - or at least they didn't to the point that they provided a solution that is any better than more conventional designs.

(Note here that we're not talking about canards, those cool forward winglets that are on both of the aircraft above, and can be seen on everything from the Su-29 (and successors) family to the F/A18 Rhino's snake-like cowling. In fact, the canards are at least a partial solution to that problem, without some of the more significant drawbacks.)

Presumably, the Russians came to basically the same conclusions that the U.S. did when they built the Golden Eagle - that's what Berkut means - in the 1990s. But the aircraft looked so cool and so unusual, plus had so much potential, that it took on a life of its own among aficionados. Then the Internet came along, and games (including Ace), and a star was born.

Today, the real problem with the forward swept wing designs isn't so much the difficult engineering problems that it raises. The problem is that the equation it tries to solve no longer needs to be solved, or I should say doesn't need to be solved at this moment.

Speed and high-g agility are critical in close-up dogfights or "furballs" - your basic aerial knife fight at close range. And those simply don't happen any more. The most important system in an aircraft today - after the pilot - are the radars and detection devices that reach out and touch the enemy beyond visual range. Way beyond it. A modern dogfight between the best aircraft in the world - say the F-22 and the PAK-FA (or PAK-50, etc.) if it ever becomes operational, or the Su-35xx if it doesn't - would take place without the airplanes ever seeing each other. Same for a fight between an F-16 and a MiG-29, etc.

That's why stealth - or relative stealth - and fancy detector arrays are the "sexy" things in modern air combat. Alas, they don't really make for a lot of romance of the skies.

But that's real life. We still have the romance of close-in dogfighting in books and movies, and games like Assault Horizon. And in those places at least, the forward-swept wing may indeed dominate.

* - In the game, the Berkut is the Su-47. In real life, it had a few different designations.
** Good ugly. I really do like the Hog - after all I did write six books about it.