U.S. Defense Officials: Russia's PAK DA Stealth Bomber "Will Never Fly"

Russian Military By Harry J. Kazianis November 3, 2022

A Senior U.S. Defense Department official speaking to 19FortyFive claimed that Russia’s planned new stealth bomber, the PAK DA, “will never fly.” A second DoD official backed up that statement, claiming that Moscow likely does not have “the resources, technological base, expertise and of course the money needed to build anything like a stealth bomber for the foreseeable future.”

While not wanting to get into specific details for a fear of revealing sources and intelligence-gathering methods, U.S. Defense Department officials clearly have serious doubts about the PAK DA, with one official being so bold to state that the bomber “looks really good in those social media posts and artist renderings I see on defense sites around the internet, however, that plane is going to stay where it is: on the drawing board.”

The PAK DA is the Russian Air Force’s attempt to build a long-range strategic bomber with stealth capabilities. An August report coming out of Russian state media site TASS claimed a source noted that PAK DA would “be armed with hypersonic weapons,” and that “its flight will be aided by drones.”

The same report, citing the same source, also claimed that by 2023 an “experimental” or “demonstration model” would be ready by sometime next year. More recent reporting by the EurAsian Times explained that Russia was hard at work developing new engines for the PAK DA and that “results of the tests showed that the engine conformed to the design parameters.”