Shot down: A-50 - What Happened?

a couple of days ago Russia lost an A50 and suffered damage to an il22 and both of these aircraft are very valuable for the Russian Aerospace forces the vks and there is some debate as to what exactly happened so in this video I'm going to be summarizing what we know and crucially what we don't know because well this is a developing situation where in a couple of days and months and years we will certainly know more about this incident so as this is a developing situation I'm not going to be speculating I'm going to stay completely with what we know and if you want to add anything to this video put it down in the comments and obviously cite your sources you know what's up at military aviation history and yes my sources are also in the description below and if you do enjoy this video consider the whole YouTube Mumble jumbo thing with liking subscribing and you know you're in this platform long enough you know exactly what to do so what do we know well an A50 was shut down this is pretty much confirmed and an IL 22m was damaged for the I 22m on some of the oen channels out there you will also find some intercepted radio coms that apparently you know allegedly originate from the il22 M that specify that it is asking for assistance and that is is coming in for in for an emergency landing at their Airfield however there's absolutely no way I can confirm the authenticity of this recording um but there is also some um picture evidence that points to this aircraft uh having after it having landed showing some shrapnel damage on the T so it does appear that an I 22m was indeed damaged and there's also some information that potentially uh suco 34 was also involved in this incident that a missile was fired at this aircraft although there's way less information available in that so I'm going to completely omit that from this video now let's talk about the aircraft that were involved here the A50 Main St is an aox type aircraft so an Airborne early warning and control aircraft and basically you know it's an aircraft that has a radar dish on top and that provides you know the ability to detect Targets in the air and also on the ground at quite a distance uh depending of course on the situation and what you're looking for and what you're trying to find and what the enemy counter measures are in terms of electronic warfare and crucially it also provides some additional uh capabilities by looking so to say Over the Horizon because groundbased radar dishes have problems picking up Target that are flying very low and due to the curvature of the earth and if you have a highflying radar dish well that can look down as well and an A50 can also then be used just like any sort of NATO type ax to first of all detect collect that information and then hand off and share that information with other assets either in the air or on the ground so it's an exceptionally uh helpful tool to uh build up some situational awareness for a force then we have the I 22 M cot this aircraft is a derivative of the IL 18 there was a previous I 22 that had that code but and this aircraft is an Airborne command post and it does exactly what's on the label it oversees coordinates and command subordinate Assets in the area and it also provides some additional uh capabilities for information sharing and relaying and all that stuff so these aircraft basically if you put them together their function is both for command as well as building up situational awareness and sharing that within a force which makes them exceptionally important and people always talk so of about the kinetic effectors right the bombs the missiles and the planes that drop those but these aircraft are exceptionally valuable to a force and that's why usually there's only a few of those available and that's the case here as well with the A50 although 40 round 40 were built uh Russia operates less than 10 and the crew there is for ranges from 10 to 15 with an IL 22 uh we are also sitting at quite a low figure of aircraft and a crew of between 10 to 12 okay and that is basically what we know we know an A50 was shut down an i22 uh was damaged and we know what those aircraft represent for the evks now you can say of course hangang on there's there are claims here the the the Russians are saying one thing and the ukrainians are saying one thing yes but we don't know exactly for sure what's going on but let's go through that now shall we first of all the first thing we have to recogniz that there's an A50 and an i22 both of these aircraft they're not going to be flying close to the front lines yeah they're not basically motal you know jet aircraft that can do St of strike and air to a they are flying at a distance from the front lines and they're Gathering intelligence and they're building up situational awareness and coordinating the forces in the area from that distance which means that they're basically going to fly outside the range of long range air defense systems and Ukraine still potentially although I don't know of course the stockpile number still has some old you know Soviet Legacy long range air to ground to air missiles or Surface to air missiles but recently has also of course U Been replacing those with NATO Patriot missiles and Patriot launch SES so it's important to recognize these aircraft are not flying directly over the front lines they're keeping it distance and they have no direct participation in sort of the kinetic element of warfare where you're launching missiles or you're dropping bombs or doing any of that stuff they're more in a support function or enabling function now this leads us to the question of who done it right so based on publicly available sources we don't know who shut down the plane because one version stands against the other right now Ukraine claims to have done it um bading to of course that speculation that it was uh Patriot missiles that shot down the A50 and damaged the i22 and Russia is also claiming that they've done it as sort of Friendly Fire right and it seems that and this is not the first time that Russia claims Friendly Fire and it seems that the Russians are far more comfortable with saying yeah this incident was friendly fire rather than admitting that the Ukrainian shut something down which is quite in interesting but that also feeds into the whole information Warfare aspect of this conflict that is you know continuously on evolving on social media in mainstream media and of course between these two governments however looking at some of the systems that are in play here so first of all the aircraft and also the air defense systems that are uh existent in the area there's a couple of things we can infer from that as an overall context now as I said I'm not going to be speculating in this video I never speculate these videos that are on recent events uh simply because we don't have the information available to make a real good you know educated call even or even a judgment call because we don't have that information but what we can say is this if Ukraine did this with a patriot missile first of all the Patriot system was of course credited in December of last year year for the shootdown of three and potentially four suai 34s and then in May of last year there was also another high profile um event where a patriot was credited with a number of aircraft and in both cases it was sort of an Sam Ambush against the enemy forces so you can in fact you know lure planes in the way you develop your you know information system the way you shape the battlefield the way you place your Sam sites and the way you also great the enemy's ability to identify those so you can in fact lure aircraft into an area where suddenly you pop up and you fire a bunch of missiles and they can't do much so this is of course possible however all those earlier incidents happen relatively closely at the front line so if we look back at the one that is in December that happened sort of in the southern next to the Sea of Azo as well but the southern region of uh Ukraine and as far as I can find the information that is available it was between 20 to 40 km off the front line so fairly close with these Su 34s however this incident that we have from all the information that I'm seeing right now happened at a much further distance and this makes sense because as I said those planes are going to keep their distance and the distances that I can calculate now from some of the sources that I have in the description so for example the commander chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces um showed an sort of a tracking record of the different aircraft and that puts one of them A50 directly Over the Sea of asof in the northern part of the Sea of asof you know we're speaking about ranges of let's say 150 to 200 km from the front lines and the Sam sites are not going to be directly on the front line they're going to be at a slight uh distance from those so could this have been Patriot yes and no but it is a tricky shot it is impossible for me to say as a commentary on the internet yes this was Patriot or this was not Pat claim that is idiotic but what I would say is that if it was Patriot then it has to be coming together of various elements first of all ukrainians have to shape the battlefield a bit so that the Russians don't exactly know where the Sam sites are have potentially also degrade the uh ability of A50 to pick up targets with ew so the A50 got closer to the front lines that maybe it should have and the same thing for the i22 if radio comes for jammed a little bit there is some evidence that ukrainians are having some success in jamming A50 so that could have been the case so that the uh planes then cut closer to the front lines um it's also possible you know the publicly available range uh data on Patriot pack 2 which the ukrainians have you know I mean there always going to be some a little bit plus and minus on those um but it is quite a tricky shot if if the ukrainians pulled this off but again we don't exactly know there are certain factors that may in fact have allowed them to do this with Patriot but at the same time it is a tricky shot from from my observation then let's talk about you know this potentially being as the Russians claim a friendly fire incident so an A50 and an i22 like I said they're not just any aircraft they high value command and control aircraft that really are tiing closely to the overall command structure of the Russian armed forces and in order them so so in order for the surface to- a missiles to engage these specific targets something has to go fundamentally wrong in the command chain from identifying over to then firing the missile there's a lot of steps in there that was my notification not yours and yes of course when we look at the war as a whole there seems to be a certain Trend amongst the Russian armed forces that coordination is somewhat lacking however in their vertical silos um of their command structures the coordination in the Russian armed forces from everything I'm hearing is getting a lot better than it was early on in the war remember they're two years into this now the Russians are also learning um horizontally uh horizontally they may not necessarily know that much but considering that the i22 m and the A50 are potentially plugged into the air defense system as a whole in the area as well because they're providing data and some some information to them as well again for something to go wrong there and for the veryy air defense systems to fire missile at them is something else right and also when we have to consider with the friendly fire incident is there are multiple aircrafts here and from the information that I can see right now is that the i22 gets hit 10 minutes after the A50 that again shows with the time delay yes I mean the missile maybe the missile travels a little a little bit further and that due to this um the time it takes for impact is longer but 10 minutes does indicate that the launch PS wasn't at the same time but somewhere with a slight delay the radar signature that both of these aircraft Pro um relay back to the operators of the air defense should really tell them um more or less what sort of Target they looking at uh and so again that that is it's it's a bizarre incident I have to tell tell you this it's just such bizarre incident so if this was Friendly Fire does it hint at some real issues within the Russian Armed Forces uh yes even though I would say that on the whole if you look at some of the um reports that are coming out now by credible sources that are doing real deep Dives on the Russian Armed Forces uh we actually do finding that the Russians are learning a lot from this war as well and they're changing a lot of their procedures as well so um although the friendly fire version that Russia likes to seems to prefer over the fact that the ukrainians shot them down um maybe plac in the hand of some of the ideas that we have in our heads of the Russian Armed Forces um I'm not necessarily going to say that I just buy it just yet but as I said I don't want to speculate too much I think both versions are from the information that is available right now incredibly hard to piece together they're not mutually exclusive and it's going to be very interesting to see what actually comes out of this in a couple of weeks or months and maybe years uh once we identify really what has happened and now I'm handing it over to you as always let me know in the comments what you thought about this incident what you think it tells us about potentially Ukrainian capabilities uh but also you know the Russian armed forces and their their air defense uh system and as always this is military Aviation histories we don't just make statements we site so if you update this video via comment you know there's potentially a couple of things coming out in the following days that may in fact add to the things that I say here give us you know give us the link or tell us where you got this from and that would be really appreciated so as always I wish all of you a great day and see you on the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 806,778

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Id: _s24cKBDY2c

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024