Russia, India To Jointly Develop New Brahmos-Like Missile

After the success of Brahmos, Russia and India are in talks to jointly develop yet another hypersonic cruise missile capable of flying at Mach 5-Mach 7 and will soon agree on a general outline of the design, the head of the BrahMos Indian-Russian cruise missile program, Praveen Pathak, said on Friday at the Defexpo in New Delhi. "In the near future, we will set up a joint working group which will work out the parameters of the missile in cooperation with developers, and also decide how much each side will contribue to the project," Pathak said. "We want to create a weapon which would not differ much from the existing BrahMos missile in weight and dimensions, so that it could be used in existing launchers on ships or mobile launchers. In this case it would not take too much work to convert such systems to hypersonic," he said. "We hope by the end of the year we'll carry out the first launch from an aircraft. It will be an air-launch”. Work on adapting the air-launched variant of BrahMos to arm India's Su-30MKI aircraft is being undertaken for the Indian Air Force, he said. Several aircraft have already been modified to carry the weapon, he added.