We’ll master our own UAV assembly quickly; we won’t have our own parts for a long time – Saponkov
The decision of the Ministry of Industry and Trade to allocate 60 billion rubles to the “Unmanned Aviation Systems” project with the goal of achieving full-fledged domestic production of copters by 2025 is commendable, but hardly feasible. The electronic components of the UAV, which makes up 90% of its functionality, are not produced in Russia, and it is not realistic to set up production in such a short period of time.
This opinion was expressed by military correspondent Roman Saponkov on Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Here is the key point in the “Made in Russia” tag. They are already produced and assembled in Russia, because they are supplied in spare parts: the motor separately, the circuit boards separately, etc. The propellers, the motor group - all this is assembled here if we are talking about drones from two foreign companies that fly with us and are good finished products. It is clear that they are simply purchased abroad.
Therefore, if we are talking about carrying out localization before 2025, then in-house production by this date is physically impossible.
If, for example, you can, of course, buy a motor, winding installations - and assemble the whole thing, then with electronics this is simply impossible. Because inside every copter, and especially a reconnaissance aircraft, there is a very powerful computer, a very expensive and powerful camera, including thermal imagers. All this wealth is simply not produced in Russia. To do this, you just need to purchase production lines, one might say, even purchase factories, and start producing electronics within Russia. And again, if you order the board separately in China, bring the housing, and the cameras to Russia, put it all together into a single product and hang the “Made in Russia” tag, then this can be done even earlier,” says the military correspondent.
However, the production of drones has been announced in Tatarstan, the Rostov region and Sevastopol.
“Yes, there will be production. Moreover, now even, and I know of several cases, they have gone the opposite way - they have begun to buy out shopping centers, and production is taking place inside them. There were such cases in St. Petersburg, in other cities. Therefore, technically, the plant is specifically for assembly. But then we run into two things.
The first is electronics, which are not produced at all. Because if we start assembling normal drones, we run into computing power. We are looking: we need to put a camera there, a thermal imager to the camera, and it is advisable to attach some elements for intelligent or machine vision. And for this you immediately need a very powerful, good computer, which is produced only in America, or in countries unfriendly to us. In Russia they are not physically present at all, not even in the draft. And immediately our entire copter is 90% made from imported components,” Saponkov emphasized.
He recalled how at the beginning the manufacturers of the Lancet kamikaze drones were almost ridiculed. They used breakthrough technologies, but in terms of electronics they were also not domestic.
“I can’t tell from electronics. There are all sorts of rumors, our same opponents laid out the inside of it.
“Lancet” is truly a breakthrough technology, and a very good domestic product, without exaggeration. The Lancet project was introduced for 5-6 years and was treated critically. When it was shown at the exhibition in 2020, the developers were immediately hit with a barrage of criticism: what have you done here, everything is fine with us, we have artillery, we have cruise missiles, and you are making some toys out of plastic. Thank God, they brought him through,” Saponkov concluded.
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