On 22 October, Rostec’s press service announced that the Russian Armed Forces had received another upgraded A-50U airborne radar system. On 25 October, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said at an award ceremony for the participants of the special operation in Ukraine that the Russian military had received the complexes, thanks to which 24 Ukrainian planes had been shot down over the past five days. On the same day, the Defence Ministry said that two MiG-29 aircraft, as well as an Su-25 attack aircraft and an L-39 combat trainer aircraft of the Ukrainian air force, had been shot down by air defence systems.
Experts believe that the Ukrainian planes were destroyed by S-400 Triumf SAMs in conjunction with the A-50 aircraft. The S-400 missiles were launched at maximum range at targets that were at that moment at an altitude of about 1,000 metres. New anti-aircraft guided missile warheads were used to defeat them.
“The S-400 combined with the A-50 is a system in which it is the A-50 that gives the target designation to the S-400, after which it hits the target. Without radar information, SAMs and aviation are blind,” said Aitech Bizhev, former deputy commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force for the unified air defence system of the CIS member states, reserve lieutenant general.
According to him, the A-50 makes it possible to increase the combat capabilities of the Russian armed forces. “This aircraft can also control an entire aviation regiment, not counting the transfer of target designation to anti-aircraft missile systems. A-50s are used to build up the radar field in places where it is impossible to deploy ground-based complexes, for example, over the surface of seas and oceans,” he added.
On 26 October 2016, the first flight of the A-100LL flying laboratory aircraft, created as part of development work on the A-100 Premier long-range radar detection and control (LRDC) aircraft, took place. The flying laboratory was built on the basis of the previous generation A-50 radar detection and control aircraft withdrawn from the Air Force, from which the radar antenna fairing and some other equipment were removed.
The Premier-476 is being developed by the Vega Radio Engineering Concern in partnership with the Beriev Aviation Research and Development Complex in Taganrog. G.M. Beriev Aviation Scientific and Technical Complex. Work on the project started in the early 2010s. The new complex was to receive a fully digital control system and a radar station with an active phased antenna array. The carrier of the advanced equipment was to be a deeply modernised IL-76MD-90A.
In 2016, a flying laboratory was built, which allowed to work out a number of functional elements of the new machine. A year later, in November 2017, the A-100 prototype already performed its first flight. In February 2022, the first flight of the A-100 with the inclusion of the onboard radio-technical complex took place for the first time. As reported, the completion of tests is scheduled for 2024.
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