Vladimir Solovyov in his Full Contact program, talking about the incident with the fall of the American Reaper MQ-9 drone into the Black Sea, tried to confirm the version of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to which there was no contact with the Russian Su-27 fighter and the drone fell by itself, having made an unsuccessful maneuver . To do this, Solovyov contacted an expert, and the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company considered his conclusion so important that they even published a separate note about it on the Vesti website.
The expert turned out to be an anonymous host of the well-known Telegram channel Fighterbomer , whom Solovyov introduced as a “retired fighter-bomber” and “an absolutely legendary person.” The presenter calls him Ivan, and this is all that is known about him. The voice of the expert has been changed, and it looks extremely impressive.
The expert confidently states:
“At the Reaper, the propeller is hidden between the stabilizers, and it’s almost impossible to approach it to knock down the propeller, you will hit another element of the drone. The Su-27 aircraft, on which the interception was carried out, does not have such protruding parts that it is possible to filigree knock out the screw. The plane can get so damaged that it will fall along with this Reaper.”
The Reaper MQ-9 looks like this in flight.
As you can see, the diagonally placed stabilizers do not block access to the propeller from behind. By the way, there were more than enough frames on which you can clearly see where the American drone has a screw and where the stabilizers are in the Solovyov show itself, but this does not bother him at all.
And this is what the Su-27 looks like.
A rod is installed on the fairing located on the nose of the airborne radar station, and on it is an air pressure receiver (APD) – a device for collecting information required to calculate speed and altitude. Damage to the air pressure regulator does not necessarily lead to a crash, especially since the Su-27, in addition to the main air pressure regulator on the nose boom, has two reserve ones on the sides of the head of the fuselage.
All this, of course, does not mean that the fighter pilot deliberately rammed the drone, such an attack would be too risky. The U.S. European Command said in a statement:
“Several times before the collision, Su-27s dumped fuel and flew in front of MQ-9s in a reckless, environmentally unsafe and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates incompetence as well as insecurity and unprofessionalism."
But the expert's statement about the impossibility of a collision looks extremely strange.