As usual, the Aviation Week blog scoops the competition with what I believe are the first pictures of the MiG’s Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicle. This comes as the Moscow air show kicks into high gear. The WWS will have plenty more coverage from Moscow as our own correspondent, Reuben Johnson, is at the scene as well, emailing us this morning with a vivid description of the conditions there:
Conditions here are nothing short of catastrophic. This place – and this air show – are a goatf%&* operating inside of a raging furnace. I have never in my 20 years of going to these things ever encountered such brutal, debilitating, life-threatening, overheated summer weather at such an event, and at the same time have never seen less capacity by an organization to handle it (i.e. no air conditioning anywhere to escape from it all, not water stations, no shade, no emergency services on hand in sufficient numbers, and – for the first two days of the show – almost no place open or with electricity hooked up where you could even purchase some water for money). I am afraid the weekend public days are going to see loss of life due to the heat and no one who knows what to do about it.
But getting back to the scoop from Ares, Bill Sweetman offers some interesting analysis of the MiG UCAV:
MiG’s Skat unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) mockup, first of all, is not a copy of an X-45, X-47, Taranis, Neuron or anything else. So far, nobody’s figured out how to make a UAV detect a threat in time to shoot back or evade it, so the only valid approach to survival is all-aspect stealth over the widest possible bandwidth, and an all-wing tailless configuration is still the best way to do that. That’s why all UCAVs look like B-2s, because the B-2 design addressed the same problem.
Go read the whole thing, it’s fascinating–at least if you’re an aviation geek like me. Also, stay tuned for more from Reuben–that is unless he’s overcome by that terrible Moscow
winter
The MiG Skat. See more pictures here.
