A drone has landed on a Russian jet
We are still not 100% sure if the Belarusian rebel group successfully damaged a valuable Russian A-50 Mainstay using a commercial drone loaded with explosives to blow up its fuselage and huge pancake-shaped radar antenna airplane.
But it now looks more likely that the Belarusian resistance group known as BYPOL has released a video showing it landing a helicopter drone directly on the plane's massive Vega Shmel-M ("Bumblebee") radar dish, While parked in Minsk near the Belarusian capital, no one seemed to notice.
Video shows a quadcopter drone approaching the air force base on a sunny winter day, whining its rotors, before idly landing above the radar dome of an A-50. The intrusion produced no apparent response, and the drone eventually took off and flew away.
A post by BYPOL on the Telegram social media platform stated:
“Belarusian partisans conducted aerial reconnaissance at the Machulishchy air base for 2 weeks with the help of store-bought civilian drones. During a successful reconnaissance operation, the rc drones not only flew Russian military aircraft, AWACS A-50U, even landed on its radar station ("dish"). So how is the regime's vaunted anti-drone system, which has cost tens of millions of rubles in its budget? The answer is obvious — — not at all. Was information about these events reported to the self-appointed ruler? Of course not.”
As such, the video shows one of several purported reconnaissance flights — not the kinetic attack the group claimed Sunday (February 26) on the Mainstay aircraft using two DJI drones, each The drone weighs less than half a pound (0.44 lb) of TNT-equivalent explosives, each reinforced by about 200 shrapnel metal balls.
Earlier on Tuesday, February 28, The Drive obtained Planet Labs satellite imagery of the air base that day, showing one of Machulishchy's A-50s intact with no apparent major damage -- meaning that if a kinetic attack were to take place, the results would be Too limited to use in satellite imagery.
To be fair, if the A-50 landed without fuel or weapons, the external impact of the explosion would probably be comparable to that of a small hand grenade. However, the explosion could still cause significant damage if it managed to shatter the sensitive internal electronics of radar or satellite uplinks under the skin; or cause the internal electronic wiring to melt down. The discolored patch on the leading edge of the radar dome was visible in satellite photos after the attack, but was not apparent in the new pre-attack footage.
Overall, if the group managed to land a drone on top of an aircraft during reconnaissance, it seems more plausible that they were able to repeat the feat with two similar DJI drones with light explosive payloads. Such an attack may still cause meaningful damage, even if it is not apparent from the outside.
The "mainstay" eye of Russia's air
Like the U.S. Air Force's E-3 Sentinel and the Navy's E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft, the Beriev A-50 has a giant "pizza pan" radome mounted on top of its fuselage, providing 360-degree radar coverage over It's hundreds of miles around. Based on the large Il-76 four-engine transport aircraft, the A-50 has a flight crew of five, supplemented by 10 specialists who operate a multitude of sensors, radios and data links to coordinate air and ground forces in response to their missions. Sensors can See.
Russia has only a small fleet of 16 A-50 aircraft, which are in high demand to support wartime operations. Only seven Soviet-era jets were upgraded to the A-50U model, which features LCD displays, satellite uplinks and long-range radios (250 miles UHF, 1,242 miles HF), improved Bumblebee-M radar, crew lounge and galley, and increased fuel capacity.