Failures and defects: the reason for the constant complaints of the Indian Navy leadership about the Russian-made Zhuk-ME radar was named

The Zhuk-ME airborne radar systems (radars) of Russian production, installed on the MiG-29K and MiG-29KUB fighters of the Indian Navy, often break down. This is written by the Western publication Defence blog, citing an alleged leak of internal documentation from Rostec.

The procurement contract was signed by India with RSK MiG in 2004. However, it subsequently turned out that the reliability of the radar was much lower than the level specified in the contract.

The averagemean time between failures (the time during which a repairable device operates failure-free between two consecutive failures) of the Zhuk-ME radar was supposed to be 150 flight hours, and the averagemean time to defect (the average operating time until the next failure) - 120 hours.

The publication claims that by 2017, the average MTBF of the radar had decreased to 60 hours. During subsequent tests, the radar worked more stably, but Indian officials continued to complain about the"unsatisfactory operation" of the Zhuk-ME and indicated this in memos addressed to RSK MiG.

As a result, specialists from the NIIR Fazotron were forced to modify the radar, replacing some blocks in it. The work was supervised by KRET (part of Rostec). But in May 2019, the Indian Navy excluded the Zhuk-ME radar from the list of certified components for MiG-29K/KUB fighters.

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