Russians aren’t solely utilizing automobile tires to guard their plane from Ukrainian kamikaze drones….
As already reported in particulars recent satellite imagery of Engels-2 airbase has uncovered a sure variety of Tu-95 Bear and Tu-160 Blackjack bombers with their wings and a part of the fuselage covered with car tires. One other picture, taken from the bottom at an unknown airfield and circulated on-line roughly one week after the pictures from Engels, exhibits a Sukhoi Su-34 Fullback bomber with tires on the fuselage, wings and horizontal stabilizers.
The explanation for the presence of automobile tires on the highest of the plane will not be recognized and plenty of theories have been formulated.
In response to Ukrainian sources, the tires are getting used as a type of makeshift safety from assaults carried out with kamikaze drones. Others recommend the bombers are retired airframes getting used as decoys to get doable strikes away from operations plane, or to make radar concentrating on by Ukraine’s long-range missiles more durable (a principle backed by the truth that the tire cowl on the Tu-95 was noticed altering the artificial aperture radar signature of the bomber).
No matter, on Sept. 10, 2023, the favored FighterBomber Telegram channel, with shut ties with the Russian Aerospace Forces’ aircrews, has posted some new photos, exhibiting what’s described as an anti-drone construction being fielded for check functions at an unspecified Russian airfield.
A tough translation of the primary half FighterBomber’s put up reads as follows:
“This resolution was urgently developed, and actually in a few days it was put in at one airfield to guard plane from drones. The scale permit this resolution for use for nearly all tactical plane and a few kinds of helicopters. If needed, tarpaulin curtains impregnated with fire-resistant compounds are added in entrance and behind.”
How the system works will not be clear: perhaps the web is used to repel hostile drones that might get caught up within the wires. Or, maybe, the construction will stop the bombs, shrapnel or fragments to fall on the goal after the explosion of the suicide drone.
Apparently, the plane depicted within the photos will not be an operational one, but it surely seems to be a retired Su-27 Flanker: this will likely point out that the brand new anti-protection system is presently being examined and might be modified earlier than being deployed on the airbases nearer to Ukraine.
Anyway, the brand new system might be simpler than placing tens of tires on the plane to guard them from kamikaze drones or conceal them from the terminal steering of the Ukrainian missiles, and growing the occasions to arrange the plane for a brand new sortie: the plane can taxi inside and out of doors of the sort-of wire mesh “shelter” as it will do with a regular hangar or hardened concrete shelter.
David Cenciotti is a journalist primarily based in Rome, Italy. He’s the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of many world’s most well-known and browse navy aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for main worldwide magazines, together with Air Forces Month-to-month, Fight Plane, and plenty of others, masking aviation, protection, conflict, business, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown a number of fight planes with totally different air forces. He’s a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Pressure, a personal pilot and a graduate in Laptop Engineering. He has written 5 books and contributed to many extra ones.
