Despite the Kremlin’s claims of military and technical superiority, the Russian Air Force continues to face a big problem with its navigation systems.
Russian military pilots are still actively using insecure, non-military navigation equipment due to the low quality of Russian own navigation systems.
Ukraine has shared abundant evidence that Russians have added off-the-shelf GPS systems, such as Garmin, to the cockpit of its combat aircraft. During the interrogation of the Russian pilot captured on June 18, it turned out that he had with him a Garmin navigator and a smartphone with the ‘Pronebo’ soft to have more accurate navigation than the onboard navigation aids of the Russian Air Forces.
GPS receivers have been found in wrecked downed Russian fighter bombers, attack aircraft, and even military helicopters.
Interestingly, the Russian Air Force has major problems with navigation. The captured pilot is Andrey Fedorchukov, a major in the Russian Air Force who had a Garmin navigator with him, and a smartphone with the Pronebo app, in order to have more accurate navigation than the onboard navigation devices of the Russian Federation. Russians don’t trust their GLONASS, everyone would like to use American GPS.
American spy satellite could track Russian aircraft and their movements. That would be valuable data to share with NATO and Ukraine.
On top of that, the UK’s defense minister also confirmed that Russia is taping basic GPS devices to its fighter jets.
Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers “taped to the dashboards” in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said.
He also noted that this was due to “the poor quality” of Russia’s own navigation systems.
British intelligence says that in the conflict to date, Russia’s air force cannot gain full air superiority and has operated in a risk-adverse style, rarely penetrating deep behind Ukrainian lines.
“For years, much of Russia’s air combat training has highly likely been heavily scripted and designed to impress senior officials, rather than to develop dynamic initiative amongst air crews,” the message added.
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