#印度隐身无人机 #
Text/Meng Yun
Recently, the National Defense Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), which is responsible for the development and testing of India's new weapons, announced a latest scientific research result, that is, India has recently successfully tested a new generation of stealth unmanned aerial vehicle systems. It is reported that the drone, which made its first flight at the Eastern India Aviation Test Site, is known as the "Stealth Wing Aerial Test Vehicle" (SWIFT), which is a scale-up test vehicle for India's future large unmanned fighter "Gattak", which is mainly used to verify its stealth design and autonomous take-off and landing capabilities.
The Indian side claims that the success of SWIFT's first flight not only means that India's self-developed high-performance unmanned aerial vehicle technology has been rapidly improved, but also has made an important breakthrough in the localization of weapons and equipment in its armed forces, because since Prime Minister Modi came to power, the Indian government and the Indian army have formulated a grand plan for the autonomy of the defense industry, planning to make India's weapons and equipment self-sufficiency rate reach more than 80% by 2030. Therefore, the development of SWIFT is also regarded as one of the important measures for the Indian army to reduce its dependence on foreign suppliers.
According to Indian media reports, swift drones from the fuselage structure to the internal flight control system, as well as the internal avionics are developed by India itself. However, the most important component of the drone, the engine, is imported, which is a 36MT small turbofan engine developed by the Russian NPO Saturn Design Bureau, which is widely believed to prove that there is still a fatal wound in the Indian defense industry, that is, there is still a big gap between more advanced aero engines, precision equipment and electronic instruments for India.
The Indian media triumphantly declared that the "Gattak" unmanned fighter under development will be a stealth combat aircraft that can "penetrate" China's air defense system, and due to the similar flying wing layout of the US X47B, the "Gatak" unmanned fighter can lower its radar cross-sectional area to below 0.1 square meters, so as to achieve the effect of stealth. However, the outside world generally believes that stealth combat aircraft technology is not only the shape of the aircraft for stealth modification so simple, this technology involves stealth material technology, stealth structure design, aircraft integrated radio frequency management, infrared stealth technology and stealth test technology and a series of technological breakthroughs, India wants to reach a relatively high level from zero in a short period of time is very difficult.
Analysts pointed out that China and the United States, the world's strongest development of stealth combat aircraft, has spent a lot of manpower and material resources on the test of stealth aircraft, and its decades of testing the principles of stealth technology and different structures of different materials are the driving force and foundation for the development of stealth technology.
(Chinese stealth drone)
Take the "Gattak" unmanned fighter using the flying wing back intake tract layout design as an example, this design requires the integrated design of the UAV intake tract, and the realization of integrated molding processing, which is simply not possible in India now, India if not with the help of US-Russian technical cooperation, their own groping will take a lot of time, so the Indian side boasts that it can pass through the air defense systems of other countries, which may be a little premature.