Pavel Osipovich Sukhoi (Павел Осипович Сухой) (July 22, 1895 - September 15, 1975) was a Russian aircraft constructor and designer.
Sukhoi was born in Glubokoye near Vitebsk, a small village in Belarus. He went to college from 1905 to 1914 at the Gomel Gymnasium. In 1915 he went to the Large imperial school of technology in Moscow (known as MVTU: Large Technical training school of Moscow). After the World War I broke out, he was drafted by the army; in 1920 he was demobilized because of health related problemy and he went back to the MVTU, graduating in 1925.
In 1925 he wrote his thesis named Chasseur Single-engined aircraft of 300 cv under the direction of Andrei Tupolev. In March 1925 he started working as an engineer/designer with TsAGI (The Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (Центральный аэрогидродинамический институт)). During the following years, Sukhoi designed and constructed of aircraft known all over the world. Examples include the heavy bombers TB-1 and TB-3. In 1932 he was assigned head of engineering and design department in TsAGI and in 1983 he was promoted to head of the department of design.
In September 1939 Sukhoi founded an independent engineering and design department named OKB Sukhoi (see The Sukhoi Design Bureau). Located in Kharkov, Sukhoi was not satisfied with the geographical location of the OKB. The OKB was isolated from the scientific pole of Moscow and insisted that the OKB would relocate to the aerodome of Podmoskovye. The relocation was completed in the first half of 1940. In the winter of 1942 Sukhoi encountered another problem - since he had no production line of it's own he had nothing to do. He had developed a new plane but Stalin decided that this plane should not be taken in production. The reason for this was that, first: the production of the other planes would slow down and in time of war this was not good and second Stalin didn't seem to particularly like Sukhoi.
The aircraft-bombers developed under Sukhoi are the Su-17 and the Su-24. The last fighter Sukhoi designed was the T-10 (Su-27) but he did not live to see it fly. On December 25 1975 the President of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union decorated Sukhoi with the golden medal in recognition of his deep scientific scholarship.