Russia is finalizing an advanced air engagement system combining “fire-and-forget” guidance and “single-shot kill” ability within a single air-to-air missile. The system aims to frustrate any missile evasion maneuvers enabling a target to escape.
The K-77M air-to-air missile with this advanced guidance system
will be fitted on to the fifth-generation fighter jet PAK-FA
(advanced frontline aircraft system, also codenamed T-50) and it
will start to be delivered to the Russian Air Force by 2017.
The major innovation of the K-77M air-to-air missile is its
guidance system, based on an active phased array antenna (APAA)
of its own, Izvestia daily reports. With APAA onboard, the
missile has zero reaction time to unexpected evolutions of the
target, which means that once it locks on an aircraft, it would
hit it no matter what aerial acrobatics the target would perform
to shake off the inbound killer missile.
The APAA guidance system for K-77M missiles has been elaborated
by the Detal design bureau, based in the town of Kamensk-Uralsky
in Russia’s Urals. The enterprise is a subdivision of Russia’s
state-owned Tactical Missile Munitions Corporation.
Mikhail Vershinin, chief engineer of the Detal design bureau,
told Izvestia that the enterprise is currently looking for a
contractor which would install a state-of-the-art production line
at the facility so that the system could start to be manufactured
as soon as 2015.
An active phased array antenna consists of a large number of
cone-shaped cells installed under a transparent-to-radio-waves
cap on the nose of the missile. Each cell receives only a part of
the signal, but once digitally processed, the information from
all cells is summarized into a “full picture,” enabling
the K-77M missile to immediately respond to sharp turns of the
target, making interception practically inevitable.
A similar technology is used in widely known Patriot
surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, manufactured by Raytheon in
the United States.
But the K-77M missile is much smaller, because it is supposed to
fit into the interior bays of the PAK-FA fighter jet to ensure
its stealth capabilities. Yet for the K-77M missile itself, a
stealth aircraft or a UAV is a legitimate target it would track
and destroy ordinarily.
The advanced missile system is fully compatible with the digital
communication system of the fifth generation fighter jet, but
also could be used on modernized fighter jets of the previous
generation.
The Active Phased Array Antenna is the most modern radar
technology today, and every such device is extremely expensive to
produce. Yet the price of the target a missile equipped with APAA
can destroy is much higher, so if the K-77M missile can guarantee
hitting the target, it is worth the cost, Aleksandr Khramchikhin,
an expert from the Institute of Political and Military Analysis,
told Izvestia.