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Partizan heavy drone

"Partizan" is a transport unmanned aerial vehicle based on a copy of the Ukrainian An-2 aircraft. With ultrashort takeoff and landing with a hybrid power plantn the machine will be able to take off and land on a platform measuring 50 by 50 m with an obstacle height of up to 15 m at the border. The flight range will be 1,000 km, the maximum speed is over 300 km/h, and the payload weight is up to a ton. The aircraft is being developed in manned and unmanned versions. The customer of the project is the Advanced Research Foundation. Most of the components will be domestically produced.

The Partizan short takeoff and landing unmanned aircraft has been created since 2019 by the Siberian Research Institute of Aviation named after S.A.Chaplygin (SibNIA) by order of the Advanced Research Foundation. At MAKS-2021, the technology was presented on a flying laboratory based on the TVS-2MS aircraft. On July 27, 2022, the Russian Federation announced its intention to create "smart" An-2, so that the aircraft was automatically controlled.

The main idea of providing ultrashort takeoff and landing in the "Partizan" project is the use of active blowing of the wing by a distributed propeller-motor group, which is a series of electric motors. It is assumed that the maximum takeoff weight of the aircraft will be 3 tons 380 kg, it will be able to carry a payload of up to 1 ton over a distance of up to 1 thousand km.

Testing of the Partizan heavy drone demonstrator being developed in Novosibirsk will begin in autumn 2023. The flight performance of the aircraft is planned to be confirmed in November-December 2023, said the director of the Siberian Research Institute of Aviation named after S. A. Chaplygin Vladimir Barsuk . This is reported by TASS .

“We are handing over the demonstrator to ground static tests at the end of August - at the beginning of September. Flight tests will begin from the end of September, and then in November-December we plan to confirm all flight performance. After the aircraft has been shown, the issue of a possible launch of pre-series production and the number of required aircraft," the source said.

Anton Ryazantsev, Chairman of the Industrial Council of the NTI Center in the direction of "Technologies for modeling and developing new functional materials with desired properties," announced the release of ten serial copies of the Partizan heavy unmanned aircraft in 2024. However, the director of SibNIA explained that the possibility of serial production of aircraft was only discussed. "The financial model of the research and production center [in the region for the development of UAVs ] is being worked out, it provided for a plant for mass production of Partizan, and when this model was spoken out, the possibility of producing 10 copies in the first year [after the launch of the center] was discussed," Badger explained, adding that the actual production volumes will depend on the demand for products.

SibNIA specialists expected to assemble Partizan by the end of 2022, but the deadlines were postponed due to the replacement of imported components and assemblies with domestic ones. In December 2022, the director of SibNIA announced that the institute would produce two prototypes of Partizan in 2023.

Defense Express publication draws attention to the fact that this is not the first time that Russia has announced its intention to start mass production. The first Partizan unmanned aircraft were to go into production as early as 2022. However, later the date was postponed to 2023 , because due to the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Federation lost access to imported components and assemblies.

In 2024, it is planned to deploy a production complex and produce 10 serial copies of the Partizan heavy UAV, said Anton Ryazantsev, Chairman of the Industrial Council of the NTI Center in the direction of "Technologies for modeling and developing new functional materials with desired properties" at Archipelago-2023. Ryazantsev noted that the specialization of the Novosibirsk region in the field of UAS is the creation of medium and heavy drones with a payload capacity of up to one ton.

“Historically strong Novosibirsk competencies are certification, testing, unique test benches, development of components and assemblies, fuselages and power circuits, power electronics,” the press service of the region comments on the situation. “In the Novosibirsk region, a full range of training for engineers and pilots is being implemented.”

Military expert, founder of the Military Russia portal Dmitry Kornev spoke about these devices to Business FM: “If we talk about a large, let's say, drone, that is, it is a Partizan drone, in fact, a unique device is obtained if all the characteristics correspond to real samples, to what is being announced now. Because he, in fact, can take off from almost a limited area and land like a helicopter, apparently. At the same time, it carries a fairly large amount of payload, that is, it is a large powerful drone, because one ton of payload per thousand kilometers. Now we have such drones, probably only large jet drones - this is the "Hunter", here it is close in capabilities, but it cannot take off from a limited platform. This is quite significant progress.

"The question, of course, is how much it will cost and whether our industry, again, will be able to mass-produce all this. There are quite serious problems with components for the production of drones in our country, these are engines, these are electronics. If we talk about kamikaze drones, then the question arises, again, in terms of timing, but in general the devices look very interesting and necessary so far. A kamikaze drone is a drone, that is, an unmanned aerial vehicle that itself carries some kind of warhead, that is, a warhead is either built into the body of this drone, like a cruise missile, like a guided bomb, or some kind of conventional ammunition is mounted ".