November 22, 2019, 00:22 / Politics

The Ministry of Defense filed a lawsuit against the only developer of a heavy high-altitude drone

He faces ruin due to a possible fine Ivan Safronov

OKB im. Simonova

The Russian Ministry of Defense demands the recovery of 643.8 million rubles. from the Kazan Design Bureau named after. Simonov, who is developing the only Russian long-range long-endurance (HALE) drone project. The claim was received on November 14 by the Moscow Arbitration Court; the contents of the claims are not included in the filing materials. The parties themselves do not disclose the details of the case.

According to the manager of one of the defense enterprises, the claim may be related precisely to the failure to fulfill obligations under the contract for the development of a HALE class drone (code “Altius-O”), which was concluded between the Ministry of Defense and the Design Bureau in November 2014 in the amount of 3.6 billion rubles From 2014 to 2018, three flight models were built using KAPO-composite, created in one of the workshops of the Kazan aircraft plant. Development proceeded with difficulties: the drone began limited factory testing, but there was not enough money allocated to complete development. In 2017, the Design Bureau presented a civilian version of the UAV, for the development of which it was planned to receive up to 2 billion rubles from the Ministry of Industry and Trade. subsidies. However, in April 2018, the general director of the OKB named after. Simonov Alexander Gomzin was arrested on charges of abuse of power in connection with the Investigative Committee's investigation into the use of subsidies from the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Gomzin was removed from his post, and the Ministry of Defense appointed the Ural Civil Aviation Plant (UZGA), which belongs to a group of private owners, as the lead contractor for work on the Altius topic, while the actual development of the device remained in Kazan. Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov, in an interview with Vedomosti, called this step correct: “Work on Altius was really slowed down, the parent organization in Kazan had problems, criminal cases were opened against the leader.” UZGA is already developing other types of drones (a Russified version of the Forpost UAV, which is a license-produced version of the Israeli Searcher UAV) and this will make it possible to unify a number of products, the official noted.

Now work on the Altius-O topic is being carried out at an accelerated pace, says a person close to the Russian Ministry of Defense: to complete the work, the department is allocating additional funding, and the initial results of testing the UAV (in August it made its first 32-minute flight at an altitude of up to 800 m in fully automatic mode) indicate the correctness of the design decisions. Over the coming years, the UAV must undergo a number of more tests, after which the issue of starting mass production and subsequent delivery to the troops will be decided, Vedomosti’s interlocutor believes.

The development of Russia's largest military drone has been closed

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For the Simonov Design Bureau, the lawsuit is a blow to the gut, an employee of the aircraft industrial enterprise believes: if the court satisfies it, the bureau will be forced to pay money from the profits received from orders that are small in size and value, which will significantly affect its financial condition (in the last published annual the report for 2017 shows revenue of 2.3 billion rubles). On the other hand, it is unlikely that the Ministry of Defense will want to ruin the serial supplier of the Dan-type aerial target and the only developer of a UAV of this class, so the amount of the claim may be reduced by a multiple; this has already happened, he believes.

Taking into account the problems faced by the OKB im. Simonov several years ago, the implementation of the Altair project was under serious threat, says Denis Fedutinov, an expert in the field of unmanned aircraft systems. In his opinion, a number of actions of the previous management drove the company into a very difficult situation, which was also aggravated by an unconstructive position in the dialogue with their main customer, the Ministry of Defense. “It is possible that Alexander Gomzin had damaged relations not only with the military, but also with other government and commercial structures, including contractors,” he believes. With the receipt of additional funding and the resumption of flight tests, there is hope that the crisis with the Altair project will be overcome, Fedutinov sums up.