Great Russian plane designers, will there be another giant ever?

I am talking about greats like Tupolev, Antonov, Yakovlev, Mikoyan etc. Just like in the west there were some greats like Kelly Johnson. It seems to me planes are more designed by committee and CAD software these days. Is there room for another super genius to emerge or were these men a product of a bygone era?

I suspect modern aircraft are too complex for one make to be expert in all the areas necessary... besides, with super computers and flight model software a design team can test hundreds or even thousands of different designs before deciding on a few to make out of real materials and test in a wind tunnel.

Most of the designers you mentioned were not just designers... they were people managers too...

mnztr wrote:I am talking about greats like Tupolev, Antonov, Yakovlev, Mikoyan etc. Just like in the west there were some greats like Kelly Johnson. It seems to me planes are more designed by committee and CAD software these days. Is there room for another super genius to emerge or were these men a product of a bygone era?

Well great leaders can emerge. ANd great scientists can still make/orchestrate breakthroughs.
The Ajaks programme is/was extremely cutting edge. Then you have people like Yuri Solomonov of the strategic missile programme.
So to me, its not all teams of "drone workers".

Avangaard and Zircon were significant breakthroughs. So yeah, no reason why great developers won't be recognised in the future.

But the problem is that while great projects will continue to happen... odds are we may not know the names of the people heading up those projects... until perhaps they die and then we learn about all the things they did.

GarryB wrote:But the problem is that while great projects will continue to happen... odds are we may not know the names of the people heading up those projects... until perhaps they die and then we learn about all the things they did.

If these people become publicly identified, they just might start having "accidents"...  kinda like how Iraqi and Iranian military specialists end up shot dead, or blown up in their own homes, or on the way to work.  

Keep their identities as state secrets, and jail anyone who releases classified info with a lifetime of hard labour at a military prison above the Arctic circle. Make it abundantly clear to the criminally-inclined 2% that the risks of working for foreign intel just isn't worth it, no matter how much funny-money they offer.

Well that will be one of the reasons their names are kept secret, but the reality is that modern systems are so complex you really can't just assign one name as the designer. I mean even in olden times you had the named person who headed up the design bureau like Mikoyan and Guriavich (spelling), but within MiG they had chief designers working on each project... all their products have a MiG designation but the two designers whose names describe the company didn't design all of the planes... and they certainly didn't design on their own in a vacuum.

Have read that Mikoyan was the designer and Guriavich was a manager of people and someone who could get things done so their skill sets didn't really overlap...

Amusing we live in a world where one side designates the other side as the axis of evil and the evil empire yet it is not the evil empire that pulls the dirty tricks and murders most of the time... as someone observing from a distance, it is the west that seems to pull the dirty tricks most of the time... but the western media is not free and no independent so the public of the west simply don't question what their politicians tell them to be true...