ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow region, August 27. /TASS/. Prospective Russian unmanned aircraft, or drones, of the Fregat family will have a capability to speed up to 700 km/h, Nikolai Dolzhenkov, the director of the drone section of the Kronstadt Group told reporters on Thursday.
He addressed the media as part of an official presentation of the Fregat drone at the MAKS’2015 international aerospace show underway in the town of Zhukovsky near Moscow.
"The Fregats will have a speed of 600 to 700 km per hour, which is inaccessible for today’s helicopters," Dolzhenkov said.
He believes the newly developed drone will have an opportunity to fill in a niche between planes and heliopters.
The Kronstadt Group press service said earlier the new promising aircraft is expected to carry 1.0 tons to 1.7 tones and the stay airborne for about ten hours.
The manufacturer plans to cooperate on the project with the Prospective Research Foundation and the Vnesheconombank (VEB) Foreign Trade Bank.
Assembly of these drones will be streamlined in 2022, Dolzhenkov said.
When TASS asked him about the main purposes of the Fregat and Orion-2 drones, Dolzhenkov said Kronstadt was developing them for exclusively civilian uses.
"We don’t plan any utilization of these two families of drones by the military," he said.
Unlike the Fregat, the Orion-2 was not presented at MAKS but spokespeople at the press service of the corporation said it had been designed for monitoring the Earth’s surface in the interests of the manufacturing sector.
"All the projects of the drones are purely civilian," Dolzhenkov told TASS. "Well, they can be militarized of course but in a different life."