Not to be outdone by the Americans, Russia’s next generation bomber, the PAK-DA, will be loaded with the latest in hypersonic weaponry, the Defense Ministry told Ria Novosti newswire on Friday.
The PAK-DA is Russia’s answer to the newest stealth bombers being built in the United States by Boeing and Lockheed Martin . Equipping them with hypersonic weaponry just puts Russia on par with air defense technologies already being tested in the U.S.
Russian owned United Aircraft Corporation is building the PAK-DA, which stands for Perspective Aviation Complex for Long Range Aviation.
“PAK-DA will be equipped with all advanced types of precision guided weapons, including hypersonic,” the source told the newswire, adding that the bomber itself will be subsonic. Last week, Boris Obnosov, general director of the Tactical Missile Systems Corporation, revealed that Russia has developed a hypersonic missile. It’s fast, but doesn’t travel very far. Obnosov said it can only make seconds-long flights and is nowhere near combat ready.
Hypersonic weapons are missiles that can fly up to 10 times faster than today’s conventional missiles. The U.S. Air Force said the sci-fi hypersonic weapons will not be ready for use until 2025 at the earliest.
Typical cruise missiles travel at around 500 to 600 mph, but a hypersonic missile can travel as fast as Mach 5 (around 4,000 miles per hour) and will give the enemy very little time to vacate the premises.
For instance, The Economist magazine points out that in 1998 the U.S. fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships in the Arabian Sea. The target was a training camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was working with the Taliban. It took over two hours for the missiles to hit their target from their launch base. By then, Osama was long gone.
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