8 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial
The Russian defense ministry has insured its new stealth drone and its control station for 1.4 billion rubles. That's $20 million. And it's probably worth every ruble.
The S-70 Hunter-B, a jet-powered flying-wing drone, perhaps is the most significant new warplane to emerge in Russia since the Su-57 stealth fighter that first flew in 2010 and now is in low-rate production.
The Hunter-B first appeared in January 2019 on the ground at an airfield in Novosibirsk in southern Russia. It flew for the first time on Aug. 3, 2019.
The Sukhoi-designed drone zoomed over the airfield for more than 20 minutes at a maximum altitude of around 2,000 feet, according to TASS, the state news organization that also reported the value of the robot's insurance.
It's easy to dismiss the Hunter-B as a developmental dead-end, owing to Russia's poor track record when it comes to fielding unmanned aerial vehicles and the satellite infrastructure that helps controllers on the ground direct a UAV's flight.
But the likelihood of Hunter-B eventually entering front-line service with the Russian air force is "big," said Tom Cooper, an author and independent expert on Russian military. "The Russian military is running multiple UAV-related projects," Cooper said. "Thus the emergence of this project is perfectly normal."
"At this point, it is going to be the heaviest and fastest UAV [in Russian service] if and when fielded,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C.
Bendett estimated the Hunter-B's weight at around 20 tons and its top speed at more than 600 miles per hour. The drone is in the same class as a manned lighter fighter.
The Russian air force reportedly is considering assigning Hunter-Bs as robotic wingmen for Su-57 pilots, extending the coverage of an Su-57 flight's sensors and adding to the manned pilots' firepower. On Sept. 27, the sole Hunter-B prototype flew in formation with an Su-57.
The U.S., Japanese and Australian air forces are developing their own wingman drones.
But Sukhoi has its work cut out for it completing the Hunter-B. “A a host of aerodynamic, electronic and high-tech issues need to be worked out,” Bendett said.
And to be stealthy, the drone needs a new engine layout. In its current configuration, the Hunter-B's AL-31F motor projects from the rear of the airframe, creating a major source of radar reflectivity.
Sukhoi has tinkered with a new version of Hunter-B that buries that engine deep inside the airframe, in the same way that Western firms do with their own stealth drones.
As the high-stakes development continues, Sukhoi at least can take comfort that its drone is fully insured.
4 juin 2021 | International, Aérospatial
The State Department has approved a possible $3.5 billion sale of AH-64E Apache helicopters to the Australian government, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced Thursday.
27 février 2023 | International, Aérospatial
French defence and technology group Thales plans to hire 12,000 new staff this year as there is strong demand across its product range, CEO Patrice Caine said in an interview with French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.
29 août 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Kelsey Atherton The ocean hides what it contains, and it is in that hiding that submarines have their power. Lurking under seas, at first with just enough capability for an attack run and now with the ability to lurk for months at a time, submarines remain power out of reach, unseen until engaged in combat or resupplying in a friendly port. That stealth comes at a cost, however, besides the simple perils of existing underwater. When submerged, submarines are more or less on their own until they resurface again, since radio waves do not travel well through seawater. Or they are for now. New research by MIT, presented at a conference in late August, devised a way for submerged submarines to communicate wirelessly with people on the surface by combining hydroacoustics and acoustic radars. Presently, submarines communicate either across normal radio frequencies when surfaced or through hydroacoustic signals and listening posts underwater that can transmit the messages back to counterparts on shore. Very and extremely low-frequency radio waves can be transmitted in a way that submarines can listen to below the surface, but it's a one-way form of communication, from stations on land to submarines. To get something responsive, with the flexibility to communicate away from static seabed hydrophones, needs something else. Specifically, it needs a way to combine hydroacoustic transmission from the submarine through water that can then be converted into a useful data. “We present a new communication technology, translational acoustic-RF communication (TARF),” write paper authors Francesco Tonolini and Fadel Adib of the MIT Media Lab. “TARF enables underwater nodes to directly communicate with airborne nodes by transmitting standard acoustic signals. TARF exploits the fact that underwater acoustic signals travel as pressure waves, and that these waves cause displacements of the water surface when they impinge on the water-air boundary. To decode the transmitted signals, TARF leverages an airborne radar which measures and decodes these surface displacements.” In testing, they demonstrated that the communication technique can transfer data at standard underwater bitrates up to 400bps, and even do so with surface waves 6.3 inches crest-to-crest, or 100,000 times larger than the surface perturbations made by the acoustic transmitter. Right now, this communication is one-way. While the signal transmitted up from the water produces useful information at the boundary with the air, a signal transmitted through the air downwards would disintegrate on integration with water. This one-way is distinct from previous forms of communication with submarines, however, as it lets the submarine talk without revealing its position to surface sensors. Despite the limitations, and the earlierness of the research, Tonolini and Adlib see a bright future for the technology, as a way to enable a host of new technology in machines. The technology, they write, can enable “many applications including submarine-to-drone communication, deep-sea exploration, and subsea IoT (Internet of Things). https://www.c4isrnet.com/c2-comms/2018/08/28/mit-discovers-way-for-submarines-to-talk-to-drones