NEW DELHI\u00a0\u2014\u00a0India has conducted its first successful flight test of the\u00a0indigenously developed Rustom-II medium-altitude, long-endurance\u00a0unmanned aerial vehicle (MALE UAV) at the Chitradurga flight test range in the southern state of Karnataka, India.
“TAPAS 201, a multi-mission UAV is being developed to carry out the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) roles for the three Armed Forces with an endurance of 24 hours. It is capable to carry\u00a0different combinations of payloads like Medium Range Electro Optic\u00a0(MREO),\u00a0Long Range Electro Optic (LREO), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR),\u00a0Electronic\u00a0Intelligence (ELINT), Communication Intelligence (COMINT) and\u00a0Situational Awareness Payloads (SAP) to perform missions during day and night,” the MoD said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rustom-II is a tri-service requirement, an Indian Air Force official\u00a0said,\u00a0adding that it will need at least a dozen successful flight trials\u00a0before it is finally inducted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Rustom- II will undergo further trials for\u00a0validating the design parameters, before going for user validation trials,” the MoD noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wednesday’s flight test was restricted to a range of less than 100\u00a0kilometers,\u00a0though the UAV’s range is slated to achieve 250 kilometers, an IAF official said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rustom-II weighs 1.8 tons and will have a capacity payload of 350\u00a0kilograms. Its has a wingspan of about 21 meters and an endurance of more than 24\u00a0hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
India’s three defense services will use Rustom-II for military missions like reconnaissance and surveillance, target acquisition, target designation, communications relay, battle damage assessment, and signal intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once fully operational, Rustom-II will begin to replace the Israeli Heron\u00a0UAVs\u00a0used by the Indian Air force and Navy.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India has conducted its first successful flight test of the indigenously developed Rustom-II medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":80810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":45,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[7,45,11,16],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3390],"class_list":["post-37815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air","category-asia-pacific","category-global","category-naval"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"ODEQBPYBDFC27NEXEZGZWZV4LQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/2016\/11\/16\/india-conducts-successful-flight-test-of-rustom-ii-drone\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n