The importance of early warning aircraft in a special military operation is very high, but the Russian Aerospace Forces have an extremely limited fleet of such aircraft. The Russian army has only a few modernized A-50U aircraft, and the promising A-100 is still in development.
The creation of modern AWACS maps based on off-the-shelf Tu – 214 or SSJ-New is a very long-term prospect. Military journalist and expert Ilya Kramnik believes that the most effective solution would be to re-equip An-12 aircraft, which are in service with the Russian Aerospace Forces, for target detection tasks.
Task: reconnaissance aircraft with a flight time from 6 hours, capable of detecting air and ground targets. Solution: An-12 military transport aircraft with H035 Irbis radar (airborne radar system) and a side-view optics complex. In the first stage, radars are removed from Su-35 fighters under repair for the duration of their repair, and then several new ones can be shipped. Information from the radar and cameras is transmitted to the workstations of 4 to 6 operators, equipped in the luggage compartment
suggests Kramnik.
As an alternative, you can take the Tu-154 from the storage bases of the Ministry of Defense as a base. This solution will be somewhat more expensive, but such aircraft have a longer residual life than the An-12.
If such a program is implemented, the RF Aerospace Forces could receive an additional 6-8 AWACS aircraft with a sufficient set of equipment to detect the vast majority of targets on the ground and in the air within a year. The resource of the boards is about 10 years, which will allow us to save time to complete the work on the creation of modern A – 100 or Tu – 214R.
Photos used: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
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