| Instead of the “friend or foe” system from the Su-27, Lithuania received a box of garbage The conflict situation surrounding the Russian Su-27 fighter that crashed on Lithuanian territory reached its climax yesterday. The fact is that the Lithuanian side has officially stated that it has a system for identifying “friend or foe” of the crashed plane.
Aviators know: you can sacrifice the wreckage of an airplane, give up on the conclusions of someone else’s commission, but you can’t lose the code identification system. History knows sad examples. After the famous flight of Senior Lieutenant Viktor Belenko on a MiG-25 to Japan, the Americans figured out the scheme for generating a coded transponder signal and tried to make a similar one. If this happened, all American military aircraft, ships and submarines could easily pass themselves off as Soviet. This is tantamount to losing the war. Then the USSR urgently had to replace all the defendants. This resulted in astronomical expenses for those times - 5 billion rubles.
Therefore, in current history, Russian military aviators read every message about the work of the Lithuanian commission and asked an alarming question: is the defendant really safe? If yes, then urgent measures must be taken, and global measures at that. And only yesterday, having received assurances from various, including confidential, sources about the incapacity of the defendant with the Su-27, the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense put an end to it: talk that the system could fall into the wrong hands is “speculation and fluctuations in the air.” , as Minister Sergei Ivanov put it.
A specialist in the field of flight accident investigation deciphered the confidence of the Russian military to Vremya Novostey. According to him, the identification system can be destroyed by the pilot pressing the corresponding button. If this button is not pressed, the transponder will self-destruct either when the ejection seat is ejected or when the aircraft hits the ground.
So, the newspaper’s interlocutor believes, the Lithuanian military is simply bluffing. It’s not clear why, though. Perhaps to support his yesterday's request to the government to allocate $20 million for the purchase of a new three-dimensional radar. The Lithuanian military, of course, may not hand over to Russia everything that is left of the fighter after the accident; no existing international rules oblige them to do this - we are talking about a military aircraft. In the recent past, there was an agreement between the USSR and the USA on the prevention of incidents over neutral waters. And when in 1969, a Soviet Tu-16 bomber flying next to an American aircraft carrier touched the ship’s superstructure and crashed into the sea, the Americans returned to the Soviet Union everything that had not sunk at a considerable depth, but remained afloat. Including the body of one pilot.
If the Lithuanian side has anything from the “friend or foe” system, it is a simple metal box measuring approximately 20 by 20 cm, inside of which there are incomprehensible debris after the explosion. It is impossible to collect them, much less restore the cipher mathematics once embedded in the device. Only these fragments can be presented by the Lithuanian side at the planned meeting of NATO military and diplomats. Perhaps this is why representatives of the Lithuanian military department are so secretive about the time and place of the secret summit. There is no need to return the mentioned metal box to Russia either. But why do Lithuania and NATO need this scrap metal? Nikolay POROSKOV |
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