Someone Built a Functioning Jet Boat That Looks Exactly Like an Su-35 FighterMost boat builds start with a hull shape and work outward. This one started with a Russian supersonic fighter jet and worked backward, which is either a sign of creative genius or the kind of ambition that ends badly. In this case, it ended with something genuinely remarkable.The YouTube channel Makerium documented its latest project in a 34-minute video: a working watercraft styled after the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker-E, the twin-engine Russian multirole fighter known for thrust-vectoring nozzles, Mach 2.25 capability, and an airframe that borders on the supermaneuverable. The boat shares none of those performance characteristics, obviously, but visually it's a dead ringer.The Build Itself Is Legitimately ImpressiveConstruction began with sheets of FX plastic board cut and assembled into an internal skeleton – a standard plug-building technique in composite fabrication, where you build the inverse of your intended shape first, then use it as the mold. From there, the builder applied layers of tooling gel coat, fiberglass mat, and resin in a sequence that mirrors how production watercraft hulls are actually made.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe Su-35's wide, blended fuselage posed a curious engineering translation challenge. On the real jet, that broad, flat belly serves as a lifting surface in the air. Adapted to a watercraft hull, the same geometry creates a planing surface, which lets the boat skim across the water at speed rather than plow through it. The wings, tail fins, and vertical stabilizers are all present in their correct relative positions, and the rear stabilizers were built to move, giving the craft actual pitch control. A fiberglass-framed acrylic canopy replicates the cockpit profile of the fighter.Propulsion comes from a pair of refurbished 650cc Kawasaki two-stroke engines – originally designed for personal watercraft in the late 1980s, where they produced around 52 horsepower and could push a Jet Ski to roughly 41 mph. Each drives a jet pump: water enters through an intake, an impeller accelerates it, and it exits through a steerable nozzle at the stern. Twin nozzles, twin engines – the visual symmetry with the Su-35's twin-engine layout is the point. The finished craft is controlled remotely via a radio link transmitter and R9DS receiver, with high-torque servos managing the control surfaces.The paint job completes the illusion. The finished hull wears the Su-35's characteristic two-tone scheme of light blue and white, with crisp masked edges producing the sharp transitions between tones that give military aircraft their distinctive factory appearance across every surface.What It's ReplicatingThe real Su-35S is a considerable machine. Each of its two Saturn AL-41F1S turbofan engines delivers nearly 32,000 pounds of thrust at full afterburner, fed through axisymmetric nozzles that can deflect up to ±15 degrees across any plane of movement. That's what enables the post-stall maneuvers the aircraft is famous for – controlled flight at angles of attack that would send any conventional fighter into an unrecoverable spin. The Macarium build's nozzles don't vector. That detail didn't make it into the watercraft version.AdvertisementAdvertisementWhat the builder did capture is the silhouette: the blended wing-body junction, the widely spaced engine nacelles, the distinctive twin vertical stabilizers. The craft even includes small external details on the fins representing the radar warning receivers found on the actual aircraft. At speed on a river, with the acrylic canopy catching the light, the visual effect is convincing enough.Among YouTube's maker channels, builds that reimagine military hardware in functional miniature form have carved out their own dedicated following, and this project ranks among the most accomplished examples the genre has produced. It's not a scale model and it's not a toy. It's a functioning twin-engine jet boat that happens to look like something that could intercept a fighter. Whether it can actually go fast enough to justify all that work is a question the water test at the end of the video answers. It moves. Convincingly.
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