Russia presented this Tuesday (14) the first finished prototype of its new attack drone, the Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik (hunter, in Russian).
The military news comes amid Moscow’s heightened tension with the West, with the deployment of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. But it’s symbolic: if all goes well, the first pilotless heavy-attack planes come into operation in two years.
The device incorporates stealth technology to the radar, popularly called invisible, although such a thing does not exist: every aircraft has some signature, whether aerodynamic or heat, that betrays its presence.
What the famous American B-2 Spirit bombers and American F-22 Raptor fighters do is reduce this as much as possible through their design, the application of special coatings and tricks to disguise the emission of their turbines.
This is exactly the biggest news in this final version of Okhotnik, also called Okhotnik-B: it has a flat-shaped turbine nozzle, just like the F-22 and the B-2 —from whom it also lends, with variations, the flying wing shape.
In the video released by the Sukhoi unit in Novosibirsk, it is not possible to predict the element. According to Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivorutchko told the Tass agency, the mouthpiece is made using 3D printers, which would facilitate its repair in remote bases.
The Okhotnik is one of the bets of the Russian military aircraft industry and, like all others, it is always viewed with suspicion and heightened scrutiny by Western analysts.
Its development began in 2011. In August 2019, Sukhoi made a big impression by releasing the video of the device taking off and performing autonomous maneuvers.
There was great doubt about its capabilities, given that information leaked to the Russian press reports that the device has 20 tons and can reach 1,000 km/h, a hunting performance.
A month later, the manufacturer released a second video, with even greater impact, with the drone allegedly being controlled in a formation flight with the fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57 fighter, which has stealth characteristics and faces a difficult production process.
The Okhotnik, say Russian military analysts, shares several systems with the Su-57, including its turbine — which is an older generation due to difficulties in developing a new, more efficient engine generation.
The idea of ​​a fighter-controlling drones is seen as one of the sure-fire alternatives for the future of fighter aviation, perhaps even the total replacement of piloted aircraft.
The devices’ data fusion capability, the application of artificial intelligence and the existence of extremely high-speed connections also depend on this very much. .
According to the Unified Aircraft Corporation, the state-owned company that unites all the former Soviet manufacturers that remained on Russian soil after the end of the communist empire in 1991, the Okhotnik will now make final tests with its new configuration and will begin series production in 2024.
Again, this is optimistic speculation, as was the launch of the Checkmate light stealth fighter by Sukhoi this year. The plane is at the prototype stage, but basically depends on foreign customers to make it viable.
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