Rustom-2 The Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle of India
Rustom-2 is an unmanned combat air vehicle developed DRDO on the lines of the American Predator drones. It has altitude ceiling of 32,000 feet and an endurance of up to 35 hours.
Work on assembling Rustom II, long range unmanned aerial vehicle is going on now. It can go on surveillance for 36 hours as against Rustom I that can go flying for eight to 10 hours, Dr Kota Harinarayana, architect of India’s Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas and Dr D S Kothari DRDO Chair at Aeronautical Development Agency, Bangalore, has said.Delivering the Dr. V. Bhujanga Rao Endowment Lecture on “Technology, aviation and national security” at GITAM University here on Thursday, he said without technological advances in aviation and air power superiority it was difficult to become an economic or military power. Successive wars since 1991 Iraq invasion had shown that air strikes proved decisive. Even in the Kargil war, precision-guided bombing by aircraft had played a major role, he said. “Stealth technology had become quite crucial in which the difference between life and death is 20 seconds depending upon who sees first,” he said.
The lecture was organised by GITAM University and Condition Monitoring Society of India (CMSI).
Dwelling on the success of LCA, he said it was the outcome of 300 industries, 40 R&D institutes and 120 academic institutes and took 15 years for development and it got the first operational clearance. Technological and organisational innovation led to the development of the lethal, survivable, supportable and versatile LCA, Dr. Harinarayana said. NSTL and BHPV also played a key role in providing the input, he said.