Savings and upgrades
On February 2, an event took place that aviation enthusiasts have been waiting for for a long time. A deeply modernized Tu-160 took off into the air: tests were carried out at the airfield of the Kazan Aviation Plant named after S. P. Gorbunov. The plane was piloted by a crew led by Anri Naskidyants. The flight lasted 34 minutes in total.
The question immediately arises: what kind of aircraft are we talking about? By itself, the designation Tu-160 - "White Swan" (or NATO's Blackjack) already says little about it, because there are old Soviet aircraft and machines of later construction, for which the Soviet backlog was used. And among the names of existing aircraft you can find Tu-160, Tu-160M, Tu-160M + and even Tu-160M2. Let's make a reservation right away: the latter is not true, since there is no Tu-160M2, exactly, as well as a "completely new" bomber, yet. The question arises: what then took off, and why so much media attention is riveted to this event? Let's try to figure it out.
So, January 2018. Tu-160 rises into the sky, which, with the light hand of Russian officials, for some reason previously received the designation M2, although, as it turned out later, this is not entirely true (or rather, not at all). Let us remind you that at that time it was about an aircraft with serial number 8-04 and the name "Pyotr Deinekin": the car was built from the Soviet reserve, that is, purely formally, it could be considered new. “Only minor modernization was carried out on the plane, the airframe and engines remained the same,” TASS later wrote, citing its source in the military-industrial complex.
Earlier, we recall that some of the combat vehicles have already undergone partial modernization. Thus, all of them (both old and new) could be conditionally attributed to the aircraft of "modernization of the first stage", in the frames of which, in fact, we received the same Tu-160, but with some improvements. In total, the Air Force for 2019 included seventeen different Tu-160s.
The first flight is not the first
Of course, the public was waiting for the first new aircraft - the very deeply modernized one, which was supposed to become the prototype of the "Super Swan". A kind of analogue of modern American "strategists". In October last year, it became known that the employees of the Novosibirsk Aviation Plant named after V. P. Chkalov manufactured the first motorcycle compartment of the Tu-160M2 strategic bomber and prepared it for shipment to the Kazan Aviation Plant named after S. P. Gorbunov. And already in November 2019, TASS announced the completion of the assembly of the first deeply modernized Tu-160M bomber. And on the second of February the plane made its first flight.
Such "agility" would deserve respect, if not for one "but". As we have already said, there is no “new build” Tu-160 yet. The plane that took to the skies on January 2 is nothing more than the modernized combatant Tu-160 with serial number 2-02, which was previously named "Igor Sikorsky". It became a kind of "prototype" of the new Tu, which should receive (or has already received) an onboard radar of the Novella NV1.70 family, a "glass cockpit", a new navigation system NO-70M, and a navigation radar DISS-021-70, the A737DP space navigation receiver, the ABSU-200MT autopilot, the S-505-70 communication system, the BKR-70M state recognition system, and the Redut-70M onboard defense system.
Experts talk about new weapons, however, so far all this is at the level of rumors. For a long time nothing has been heard about the promising long-range / ultra-long-range X-BD missile. Recently, the media have been talking about a kind of "hypersonic" missile for the PAK DA. However, if we consider that aeroballistic "Daggers" are called hypersonic weapons, it is rather difficult to say something with certainty about this complex.
Most likely, the updated Tu-160, like some other aircraft of this type, will be able to use the X-101 cruise missiles already tested in Syria. It is noteworthy that on the machine with serial number 2-02 now, apparently, the optical-television sighting system has been completely dismantled, which can reduce the multifunctionality of the complex. However, we will proceed from the conditionally optimistic option: the OTPK could be made retractable, similar to how it was implemented in the case of the Platan installed on the Su-34.
There are no less contradictions in the case of the power plant. As it became known, the experienced Tu-160M does not have new NK-32-02 engines, but they intend to install them on other modernized machines.
Ultimately, we got a rather ambiguous version of modernization, and the available data often raises more questions than answers. It is known for sure that fifteen combat vehicles are being upgraded to a new level. Ten completely new Tu-160Ms will have the same (or very close) set of equipment, the first of which is due to take off in 2021.
For the first second
Actually, it is from this moment that the history of the M2 begins: as it became known, the Ministry of Industry and Trade uses the Tu-160M2 marking precisely to designate vehicles built from scratch.
“The construction of the Tu-160M2 strategic missile carrier is underway. Its first flight is scheduled for 2021, and deliveries to formations and units of long-range aviation should begin in 2023. Ten such missile carriers will be purchased by 2027,”
- quotes the words of the Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation magazine "Radioelectronic Technologies".
If the information presented by the leading Russian media is correct, then we can talk about the conditional unification of Tu-160 strategic bombers in the future. This is very handy, considering that, in addition to them, the Air Force will continue to operate "strategists" of the Tu-95MS type, as well as the Tu-22M3 long-range bomber and its new version Tu-22M3M.
All this will take place against the backdrop of the active development of the promising PAK DA - the first Russian strategic stealth bomber, which is expected to be launched into the sky in the mid-2020s and put into operation by the end of the decade. But this is if everything goes as the UAC plans. Russia has incomparably less experience in creating stealth than the United States. And the price of the PAK YES may be, if not comparable to the cost of the B-2, then quite comparable to the price of the promising American B-21 (experts say that one "American" will cost about $ 500 million).
In general, we can expect repeated postponements of the first PAK DA flight: we saw something similar in our time on the example of a Russian fifth-generation fighter. In other words, the modernized Tu-160, as the frankly old Tu-95 is written off, is likely to become the basis of Russia's strategic aviation. At the same time, a real alternative to the "White Swan" may not appear for many more years.
