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Soviet fighters do not have special pylons to launch Western weapons. Now the US has said that tablets helped to integrate weapons.
The Ukrainian Air Force uses iPad-style tablets in the cockpits of Soviet fighter jets to ensure rapid integration of Western missiles. This is reported by The War Zone.
During a speech at the annual global security forum of the CSIS think tank, US Deputy Secretary of Defense for Procurement William LaPlante confirmed that to speed up the integration of Western air-to-ground weapons, a tablet was integrated into Ukrainian fighter jets.
“There's also a series ... we call it air-to-ground, we call it euphemistically ... think about the aircraft that the Ukrainians have, and it's not even the F-16, but they have a lot of Russian and Soviet-era aircraft. Working with the Ukrainians, we were able to take a lot of Western weapons and make them work on their planes, where the pilot controls them with an iPad. And they fly it in the conflict zone already a week after we handed it over to him," said Laplante.
He did not give more details, but a video of a Ukrainian Su-27 fighter pilot who had a tablet on board appeared online. The footage shows the launch of the AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missile. The role of the tablet is also to display the navigation map, as well as other important data.
As for air-to-ground weapons, we can be talking about high-precision JDAM-ER bombs and French Hammer bombs. Bombs are programmed before flight, then the pilot must navigate the launch area, probably using a tablet. Then there is a launch. Most critical is the fact that Ukrainian Soviet-era fighters do not have data bus interfaces that would ensure full compatibility with any of these three weapons.
The authors also note that the rockets are integrated using a special pylon. It can be adapted to the weapon used and connected to the tablet. Therefore, there may be such a situation that the aircraft will not need a data bus connection at all. The pylon can contain a Bluetooth hardware module that connects to the panel in the cockpit. While this may be far from a traditional military solution, it will make integration easy without having to wire up the aircraft specifically for these new munitions.
