According to media reports, a week ago, an unidentified drone was spotted over Ulyanovsk, presumably for military purposes. The Ministry of Defense, according to various sources, denies the fact of the flight or does not comment, the aviation industry also does not report anything meaningful.
The incident took place, as follows from the publication of the Kommersant newspaper, a week ago, on February 17. The pilots of a pair of planes of the Ulyanovsk DOSAAF flying club witnessed the flight of the unidentified drone. The object arose on the left bank of the Volga over the village of Arkhangelskoye, opposite Ulyanovsk.
The drone, according to the pilots, was rather big: the size of their own cars (Czech L-29 Dolphin), the weight was estimated at three tons. Altitude 2100 km, speed 500 km / h.
The object approached dangerously with the planes, they changed course and parted with it. The alleged drone descended to 500 meters and went further south-west towards Penza, disappearing from the radar screens.
The incident caused an explosion of displeasure among civilian aviators. “It’s not normal when such a fool, filled with no one knows what, sweeps at such a speed over an almost millionth city in the flight zone of Ulyanovsk airport, where at that time regular planes were also landing,” Kommersant quotes the head of the Ulyanovsk DOSAAF flying club Vladimir Dvoryaninov.
What a UFO is like
Most of the questions are raised by the description of the apparatus from the words of the observers: "with shortened wings", "looks like a flying rocket."
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None of the large military drones being developed in Russia and shown to the public in one form or another fit this description: modern UAVs of this size usually have developed wings of a large span, which are striking and do not allow to describe the device as a "rocket".
It does not look like a "flying wing" either: even if the "MiG" drone "Skat" could already fly, it would be extremely difficult to confuse it with a rocket, just like American vehicles of a similar layout.
But this description looks very much like Soviet-designed jet drones - for example, Tu-143 / Tu-243 of the Reis (Reis-D) complex. Or target complexes based on them. For example, the Tu-243 is over 8 meters long, which, taking into account the observation errors, is quite comparable to the nearly 11-meter length of the L-29 aircraft. Tu-141 "Strizh" is even larger, with the preservation of the rocket "exterior".
In any case, this is nothing more than speculation, general considerations. The military firmly denies the fact of any flight in this zone, the industry is silent. This is all the more interesting, since the question, judging by the way it was presented in the press, interested only civilian aviators. Moreover, according to the same Kommersant, the FSB, whose interest can be understood only in the context of a set of measures called "protection of state secrets."