MOSCOW, February 15. /TASS/. Ukraine is trying to replicate Russia’s multifunctional unmanned aerial vehicle Orlan-10, which is actively used by the Russian Armed Forces in the special operation in Ukraine, Roman Ivanov, the general designer of the Special Technology Center (STC), told TASS in an interview.
"The STC made several attempts to arrange for the production of Orlans at other enterprises. None of the firms managed to achieve the same results. There were 3-4 attempts in Russia, and now I already know about three such attempts in Ukraine. A mockup of the Orlan-10 featured in the exposition of a Czech-Ukrainian company at the recent exhibition in Abu Dhabi. It remains to be seen how they went about this business. Probably, some of these devices will begin to be brought to us soon. Shortly after they start using them against Russia we will get them as spoils of war," Ivanov said.
The way he sees it, the Ukrainian copies of the Orlan are inferior to the original.
"Surprisingly, whereas before they somehow tried to introduce some ideas of their own, now they’ve just copied all our basic strategic solutions and mechanically transplanted them to their new airplanes. As it is. The tricky thing is that the basic technical solutions are very complex. Even those competitors who have all technical documentation and enjoy the designer company’s supervision tend to have problems with replicating these products. That the Orlans are being copied testifies to the fact that they lack competences to fully develop their own equipment and are unable to surpass Russia. They do make replicas, but their products will remain copies unequivocally worse than the original," Ivanov said.
Orlan-10 is a multifunctional reconnaissance drone system. Earlier it was reported that the drone’s attack configuration, too, was used in the special operation zone.