The program of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry to maintain the working capacity of the Soviet-era VR-2 operational/tactical systems with Tu-141 Strizh unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) included their transformation from reconnaissance to strike ones. This was proved by the crash of a Ukrainian Strizh drone with a combat payload in the suburbs of the Croatian capital of Zagreb, military expert Vladimir Karnozov writes in the Independent Military Review.
According to him, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry initiated a program in 2014 to improve the efficiency of the VR-2 systems, which envisaged maintaining the Strizh UAVs in good working order and improving their performance characteristics.
Tu-141 Strizh upgrade
Having analyzed the route of the Tu-141 that crashed in Croatia, experts calculated that the UAV had passed in the air for a little more than an hour, flying at a speed of 700 km/h and at an altitude of 1,300 m, and covered 1,024 km.
As Karnozov explains, the modernized drone had the same range as the original one because during the upgrade its maximum flight speed had been reduced from 1,000 km/h to 700 km/h, which had cut its fuel consumption per hour. At the same time, the expert notes that the flight altitude, which equaled 6,000 m, was also reduced.
“The inherent flight parameters were most likely changed because of the need to ensure higher survivability of the UAV over the battlefield. At an altitude of 6 km, an aerial vehicle with a length of 14 m and a wingspan of 4 m and an airframe made of aluminum alloys is perfectly observable by radars. The decrease in the altitude to 1,300 m and the speed to 700 km/h looks like a compromise between UAV observability and range,” the expert believes.
The Tu-141 UAV can carry up to 250 kg of payload, however, as the newspaper notes, the replacement of Soviet-made reconnaissance systems with modern Western equipment allows freeing up the payload weight for transforming the drone into its strike version.