Tupolev To Make First Drone In Decades - Ukranian Tupolev Tu-143 launched in 2008.jpg

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kelseya.../#54c0d54c20b5

Russia’s Tupolev is best known for building a strategic bomber powered by
turboprop engines. The Tu-95 Bear, a still-flying relic of the Cold War that
first took to the skies in 1952, is an artifact from an older era of design,
with durability that can last the better part of a century. Last week, Tupolev
announced a firm stab into the skies of the 21st century. The venerable defense
giant is going to start making drones for the modern Russian Armed Forces.

The announcement was scant on details. In an annual report, the company
announced it will be making both crewed and uncrewed aircraft, using the latest
technology. What new drones Tupolev produces won’t be its first foray into
military drones.

Tupolev produced reconnaissance drones like the Tu-143 during the Cold War, but
they were of a type only barely recognizable as drones today. Lacking pilots and
live video feeds, the drones flew preset paths, taking pictures on film that
would then be processed once they returned home.

While mostly an abandoned artifact, Tu-143 drones were spotted on Ukrainian
battlefields in 2014.

Among other military projects abandoned and mothballed after the dissolution of
the Soviet Union and the hardship of the 1990s was an adaptation of the Tu-143
design, but with weapon bays and built for combat, known as the Tu-300.

“It’s hard to envision what kind of drones Tupolev is supposedly planning due to
lack of open-source data,” says Samuel Bendett, adviser to CNA Russia Program
who specializes in Russian unmanned military systems. “But given the Design
Bureau's bread-and-butter- know-how for making the world's premiere long-range
bombers - Tu-95, Tu-142 and Tu-160, it's hard to imagine that Tupolev would not
want to build on that in making their drones.”

Like venerable aircraft giant MiG before it, Tupolev’s announcement of drone
work should be taken skeptically until prototypes exist.

“There is a major difference between designing a manned aircraft - something
that Russians have a lot of experience with - and designing today's UAV,” says
Bendett, a CNAS Adjunct Senior Fellow who researches Russian military unmanned
systems and AI. “Russians have had issues with building domestic drone engines,
microelectronics and sensor components that are part of today's modern military
drone. This resulted in program delays and re-prioritizations.”

Still, the announcement fits into an overall pattern of robot-centric
modernization of the Russian military, and it's possible that a whole host of
new flying robots could supplement Russia’s unmanned robots on the ground.





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