F-18 vs Su-57: Which Fighter Actually Wins, and Why the Answer Is Not Obvious

The question almost everyone is really asking

This matchup got popular for one reason: Top Gun: Maverick. The unnamed enemy fighter in the film is a Su-57, and the whole plot turns on Maverick’s line that a Super Hornet is no match for it.

That framing is dramatic, and it is also the single most repeated claim about these two aircraft. It deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.

The honest version: in a head-on beyond-visual-range fight between one of each, the Su-57 should win, and the margin is real. Almost everywhere outside that one scenario, the comparison collapses in the Hornet’s favor for reasons that have nothing to do with flying.

Where the Su-57 genuinely wins

The Su-57 is a generation ahead, and it shows in the places that decide a modern air-to-air engagement. It carries missiles inside the aircraft, where they do not light up an opposing radar.

Its sensor fit is the real advantage. The Sh-121 system combines an X-band nose array with L-band arrays in the wing leading edges, which is a deliberate counter to stealth aircraft, plus an infrared search and track set that hunts without radiating at all.

Sukhoi also claims the Su-57 can supercruise at around Mach 1.3, meaning sustained supersonic flight without afterburner. The Hornet cannot do that, and afterburner is the fastest way to empty a fighter’s tanks.

Add three-axis thrust vectoring and the Su-57 out-turns the Hornet at low speed too. If the fight somehow reached a close-in merge, the Russian jet still holds the cards.

How stealthy the Su-57 actually is

This is where the Felon’s reputation runs ahead of the aircraft. The Su-57 is stealthier than any previous Russian fighter, which is a much lower bar than being stealthy in the American sense.

Observers photographing early airframes documented visible panel gaps, proud rivets and poorly aligned sections, none of which a signature-critical design tolerates. The infrared search and track ball sits in the airflow ahead of the canopy, and the aft fuselage was never shaped to the standard of the forward sector.

Treat that figure as an informed estimate rather than a measurement. No air force publishes real radar cross section numbers, and Russia’s stated design target of 0.1 to 1 square meter is an intention, not a test result.

The engine is the clearest evidence that the aircraft is unfinished. Every Su-57 in service flies on the AL-41F1, a developed Su-27-era engine, because the clean-sheet izdeliye 30 it was designed around has slipped for years.

Where the Hornet wins, and it is not close

The F/A-18 Hornet wins on everything that is not a spec sheet, starting with the fact that it goes to sea. It was built to catch a wire on a pitching deck, which drove the strengthened structure, the wide track landing gear and the folding wings.

The Su-57 has no carrier version and no carrier to fly it from. That single difference decides where each aircraft can actually turn up.

The Hornet was also the first American combat aircraft designed from the start to fly the fighter and the attack mission in one sortie, which is why the designation carries both letters. Its best day demonstrated exactly that.

That record matters because the Su-57 has nothing comparable to set against it. It also explains why the Hornet keeps appearing in any serious list of the best fighter jets in the world decades after its design froze.

The number that settles the argument

Russia’s entire Su-57 force is small enough to be genuinely hard to count. Published estimates as of 2026 run from about 20 to 25 operational airframes including prototypes at the low end, to 44 or more including roughly ten test aircraft at the high end.

Take even the generous figure. A single United States Navy carrier air wing deploys a comparable number of strike fighters, which means one American carrier puts to sea with about as many fighters as Russia owns Su-57s in total.

Roughly 1,500 legacy Hornets were built between 1974 and 2000, and seven nations flew them. Numbers are a capability, and this is the gap no avionics suite closes.

Combat records compared

The Hornet has flown in Desert Storm, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria across four decades, with the air-to-air result above and a long attack record behind it.

The Su-57’s combat history is thinner and more carefully managed. Russia has used it over Ukraine mainly to launch standoff missiles from its own airspace, and reporting through 2026 has it firing cruise missiles rather than penetrating defended airspace.

The reason is not mystery, it is scarcity. When a fleet is this small, losing one aircraft is a national embarrassment, so commanders keep them back.

Ukraine has still reached them. Drones damaged at least one Su-57 on the ground at Akhtubinsk in June 2024, about 370 miles (600 km) behind the front, and satellite imagery showed a crater beside the aircraft.

Russia did claim a first Su-57 air-to-air kill in August 2026, announced by the head of its state arms exporter. No date, target, location or evidence came with it, so it reads as a sales line for the export version rather than a combat report.

Which F-18 are you actually asking about

This page compares the legacy Hornet, the F/A-18A through D. Most people typing “F-18” after watching a film are picturing the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which is a different and larger aircraft.

The Super Hornet entered fleet service in 1999 with about 25 percent more wing area and General Electric F414 engines rated roughly 35 percent above the legacy jet’s F404s. It is the aircraft flown in Top Gun: Maverick and by the Blue Angels, who moved off the legacy Hornet in 2020.

Against the Su-57 the Super Hornet closes some of the gap, with a better radar and a lower clean radar signature, but not the stealth gap or the supercruise gap. The conclusion below does not change.

Who actually wins

One Su-57 against one Hornet, both with full tanks and no support: the Su-57 wins, probably before the Hornet sees it. Stealth plus internal carriage plus L-band arrays plus supercruise is a real generational advantage, and the Hornet’s design is nearly fifty years old.

As a weapon system rather than an airframe, the answer inverts. The Hornet deployed in numbers, from ships, for four decades, with allies flying it and a kill record to show for it.

The Su-57 has one export customer, Algeria, which ordered 14 of the Su-57E version and began receiving them from late 2025. That makes Algeria the first foreign operator of the type, and the only one.

So the film was right that a Hornet pilot should fear meeting a Felon, and wrong about how often that could ever happen. For a closer fight, compare the Felon to something built to hunt it in our F-22 Raptor versus Su-57 matchup.

Both aircraft are also running out of road in their current form. The Marine Corps retires its last legacy Hornets by 2030, and the Su-57 waits on an engine that has been almost ready for a decade.