The Russian military is planning to significantly increase the internal funding that it devotes to testing developments in stealth technology, defence industry sources and state media report.
The "discussions on-going are looking at [sums in] millions of roubles", industry sources concerned with the programme told IHS Jane's .
The main testing and research facility where this development work will be carried out is not at the Gromov Flight Research Institute (LII) in Zhukovskiy, but instead at a military facility, the Scientific Research Centre of the Air Defence Forces (NITs PVO) in the city of Tver, 170 km to the north of Moscow.
This facility is originally where the radar cross section (RCS) measurements and reduction tests were carried out from 1980-90 on the Sukhoi Su-27 'Flanker' and Su-30 'Flanker-C', and the Tupolev Tu-160 'Blackjack'. The plan now is for the centre to be modernised to the point where it can conduct RCS testing on the Sukhoi T-50/PAK-FA fifth-generation fighter and on the PAK-DA next-generation bomber, currently undergoing design studies.
The NITs PVO testing centre was one of the central research entities of the PVO when it was still a separate branch of the then-Soviet armed forces. In Soviet times the PVO Strany were considered to be a higher priority than the regular Russian Air Force (VVS), as their mission was to protect the USSR from a nuclear attack.
In 1998 the PVO were merged with the VVS to become a joint service, with the latter taking on the dominant role. Since that time, the Tver facility had, according to Russian industry sources, "fallen into disrepair and had seen several 'waves' of staff reductions". By one of the institute researcher's, Lieutenant Colonel Dmitri Akhmerov, own admission, the facility had been receiving little funding up to this point beyond staff salaries.
The director of NITs PVO, Aleksandr Travkin, stated that the facility would be renovated before the end of the year and that new equipment would be installed for measuring the radar wave return from models of various aircraft, and that three specific test stands for the testing of missiles would be replaced.
In addition to the main building that houses the facility, the centre also has an outdoor test range of more than 1 km2, called ERIK-1, which features a radar signal synthesiser mounted on a 72 m tower. This signal generator irradiates models of aircraft as they are moved along a system of cables at a height of 30 m and measures the resulting return radar image. The updating of the ERIK-1 test unit in November cost approximately RUB1.7 million (USD52,000) and there will be another RUB5.6 million spent on the upgrading of models of air-defence missile emplacements on the range.
Russian industry sources state that the decision to renovate and upgrade this facility is part of an effort by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to maintain some currency in the ability of the armed forces to test and evaluate some of the newer technologies, like stealth techniques in design.
"The MoD and the VVS have never been content with the situation in which the Russian aircraft industry has far superior facilities and capabilities for RCS and other evaluative testing," said a Russian industry analyst. "When industry representatives and the VVS meet for programme reviews the military has no ability to present test results that can be used to compare, validate or even contradict the data being presented by the industry design bureaux or industry research centres, and they regard that situation as unacceptable."
