According to information circulating on social platforms, after 20 o'clock local time last night, a military plane of the Russian Air Force crashed in the Kanevsky area of Kra**dar Krai (near the Sea of Azov).
And according to the TG "Light of Romanov" telegram channel, the plane that crashed was an A-50U AWACS aircraft shot down by Russian air defenses.
According to the single-shift dispatch office of the Kanevsky district, at about 20:00 Moscow time, two planes (the other allegedly a Ukrainian drone) fell in the area of the Trudovaya-Armenian farm in the Kanevsky district.
When the local fire brigade arrived, they found that the plane and surrounding plants were burning, and the fire area was about 250 square meters....The fire did not threaten residential buildings, nor did farm dwellers**.
Currently, the fire is being extinguished. A total of 40 people and 14 pieces of equipment were involved in extinguishing the fire. Law enforcement and the Secret Service are also working on the ground....
Local residents or firefighters photographed the ** of the fallen aircraft parts, but it is not certain that it is the A-50U AWACS aircraft.
If it is true, the A-50U AWACS aircraft will be a huge loss for the Russian Aerospace Forces, and the whole army will be fine.
Five or six, all deployed in the direction close to the battlefield before the Russian-Ukrainian war, monitoring Ukrainian fighter jets and NATO's early warning aircraft and electronic warfare aircraft....UAVs, if one is shot down, there will definitely be a major air defense vulnerability!
And in January, the Ukrainian side announced that it had used "Patriot missiles" to shoot down an A-50U and an Il-22M electronic warfare command aircraft.
However, the Russian army refuted the rumor that the Il-22M was hit by its own S400 anti-aircraft missile, and did not crash, but was forced to land after the crew struggled to save it.
The specific reason for the last time was not announced, and it is unknown whether it was shot down this time, but some military observers analyzed that the tactics that the Ukrainian side may use are: launch a drone with a signal amplifier (simulating the signal characteristics of a fighter), in parallel with a 50U, to lure the Russian anti-aircraft fire ** (the drone collided without launching missiles!) ）…It was the A-50U that was "shot down" that it was a forced accidental injury.
Seeing this, some people will ask: A-50U AWACS aircraft or Il-22M are both expensive large special aircraft, why are there no fighter escorts? Even if you really encounter an enemy plane or missile attack, at least you can "abandon the pawn and protect the car", right? This is the problem of the Russian army's combat management! In principle, there must have been fighter escorts, but they were not dispatched, even though it had already happened once last month, and it was such a Madahar.
**The above is the newly developed A-100 AWACS aircraft cockpit with unknown performance antenna, which is the most obvious difference in appearance from the A-50U below.
The active phased array radar installed on the A-100 is a generation more advanced than the passive phased array radar of the A-50, but the backwardness of technology has led to the fact that the A-100 prototype has appeared for at least 5 years and is still being improved.
A-50U is an improved version of the A-50, mainly the modernization and upgrading of the technical performance of the radio technology system, the radar system has been greatly improved by the use of new components, but also significantly improved the working conditions of the crew, for example: the original picture tube display screen is replaced with an LCD screen, and some tube components are upgraded to transistors, but the overall performance improvement is not large.
A-100 is equipped with two gallium arsenide T R components of the base array, although it is lagging behind the latest gallium nitride (only our army's air police-500 early warning aircraft is used, and the U.S. military's E-7 early warning aircraft that replaces E3 has just used gallium nitride devices), but the Russian aviation industry has not completed the integration of new early warning aircraft with great effort, which also shows that as long as industrialization is stagnant, even if it is three or five years of hard work, it will not be able to catch up, and Russia's electronics industry has always been very backward.
In terms of detection capabilities, large early warning aircraft such as A-50U will have a detection range of more than 350 kilometers for MiG-21 fighters, and more than 500 kilometers for B-52H, but this is only theoretical, what is needed on the battlefield is accurate detection distance and accurate identification, which is like the naked eye of a person, can see a tree 500 meters away, but to distinguish the tree species, whether it is a poplar or a pine, if it is not clear, it is equivalent to an invalid sight distance, What is needed on the battlefield is to distinguish between poplars and pines at a distance of 200 meters, and in the 2020s, what is needed is to distinguish between a pot of jasmine and a pot of gardenia from 200 meters awayObviously, the A-50U could not do it, and could only fly in the airspace very close to the threat airspace, striving for more accurate detection, but it was exploited.
The interior of the control cabin of the earliest A-50 AWACS aircraft, there are currently 22 AWACS aircraft in the Russian army, including the mothballed ones, and such a large land area is too small! You must know that China and the United States are equipped with several types of early warning aircraft in 170 and 150 respectively, which is not enough, by 2030 to be equipped to 200, Russia of course also wants to increase the number of early warning aircraft, but limited by the industrial capacity of the crotch, it can only be to quench the thirst of Wangmei.