BrahMos developmental flight successful

A new developmental flight of India's supersonic cruise missile, BrahMos, that took place on Friday provided a fund of information on the new sub-systems that were designed and developed in India and used in the flight. The missile lifted off at 10 a.m. from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur, Orissa, from a truck. It reached its full range of 290 km at twice the speed of sound (2.8 Mach).

A BrahMos flight in steep dive mode over the Bay of Bengal took place on Wednesday. Although BrahMos had become an operational missile and been inducted into both the Army and the Navy, Friday's flight was called a developmental flight because it was aimed at testing many of the sub-systems, said A. Sivathanu Pillai, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, BrahMos Aerospace Limited. These sub-systems included high energy batteries, airframes, composite materials, roll-cap, canister and other hardware and software, Dr. Pillai added.

“Wednesday's flight was to test BrahMos' capability again. Friday's developmental flight was to test the adequacy of many sub-systems newly designed and developed in India. We received good data from the telemetry. It was a totally instrumented flight. From the instrumented data, we will analyse the sub-systems' performance. The mission objective was to evaluate the sub-systems' suitability,” he said.

This was the 30 flight of BrahMos, a two-stage cruise missile jointly developed by Russia and India. Although it is essentially an anti-ship weapon, it can be launched land to land, sea to land and land to sea. Efforts are under way to launch it from aircraft and submarines.