A new developmental flight of India's
supersonic cruise missile, BrahMos, that took place on Friday provided a fund of
information on the new sub-systems that were designed and developed in India and
used in the flight. The missile lifted off at 10 a.m. from the Integrated Test
Range at Chandipur, Orissa, from a truck. It reached its full range of 290 km at
twice the speed of sound (2.8 Mach).
A BrahMos flight in steep dive mode
over the Bay of Bengal took place on Wednesday. Although BrahMos had become an
operational missile and been inducted into both the Army and the Navy, Friday's
flight was called a developmental flight because it was aimed at testing many of
the sub-systems, said A. Sivathanu Pillai, Chief Executive Officer and Managing
Director, BrahMos Aerospace Limited. These sub-systems included high energy
batteries, airframes, composite materials, roll-cap, canister and other hardware
and software, Dr. Pillai added.
"Wednesday's flight was to test
BrahMos' capability again. Friday's developmental flight was to test the
adequacy of many sub-systems newly designed and developed in India. We received
good data from the telemetry. It was a totally instrumented flight. From the
instrumented data, we will analyse the sub-systems' performance. The mission
objective was to evaluate the sub-systems' suitability," he said.
This was the 30 flight of BrahMos, a
two-stage cruise missile jointly developed by Russia and India. Although it is
essentially an anti-ship weapon, it can be launched land to land, sea to land
and land to sea. Efforts are under way to launch it from aircraft and
submarines.
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