PAK DA: Russia’s ‘Mission Impossible’ Stealth Bomber Won’t Fly

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Key Points and Summary: Russia’s PAK DA stealth bomber program remains stuck in perpetual limbo, with ongoing leadership shakeups and widespread failures at the Tupolev design bureau reinforcing doubts over the project’s viability.

-Once billed as Russia’s answer to America’s B-2 and B-21 bombers, the PAK DA has been delayed for decades, hindered by an underfunded, hollowed-out aerospace sector that lost much of its design talent after the Cold War.

-Although official timelines speak of flight tests and production in the late 2020s, experts in Moscow insist that major shortfalls—especially in stealth technology, advanced materials, software development, and industrial capacity—make a working PAK DA all but impossible.

PAK DA Stealth Bomber Dreams Fade: Why Russia May Never Field It

In November 2024, Russian news services announced the removal of the Managing Director of the PJSC Tupolev aircraft company. Konstantin Timofeev.  

The parallel cashiering of the CEO of PJSC Yakovlev, Andrei Boginsky, accompanied his departure.  

Three weeks prior, it was announced that their boss, the CEO of the United Aircraft-Building Corporation (OAK), Yuri Slyusar, was departing that position to become the new regional governor in the Russian city of Rostov-na-Donu.

The official reason given for sacking two aircraft company heads was the “failure of the civil aviation program.” 

Only 3 of the 35 airliners planned were manufactured in 2024, and production targets for 2025 have been scaled back from 82 planes to only 20.

According to a long-time Russian aviation industry analyst in Moscow, this failed performance was also one of the reasons for Slyusar leaving after almost a decade in one of the most powerful positions in all of Russia’s defense and aerospace sector just ahead of the firing of these subordinates.

“Add up all the aircraft programs – both civil and military – that are years behind and will never be built in the numbers they have been ordered, if at all. Slyusar does not want to sit in the chair where all he hears all day is bad news.”

PAK-DA Stealth Bomber: Arrested Development

As with most similar situations in Russia, there is another more significant factor in this shake-up inside what is left of the country’s defense sector.  

Slyusar left what the same analyst described as a “sinking ship” just in time and the Tupolev General Manager was removed not for failing to meet the targets for commercial passenger aircraft production “but for showing zero progress on the Russian PAK DA program,” an acronym that means “Перспективный авиационный комплекс – дальней авиации” (Perspective Aviation Complex – Long Range Aviation in English).

The original design concept for the program was billed as an analog to the Northrop B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

Like the American 1980s stealth bomber, it was to be a “flying wing” configuration with no vertical control surfaces and would have a surface composed of low observable, radar-absorbing materials.

However, with the more recent development of Northrop’s similar, next-generation bomber design, the B-21 “Raider,” the official description now emanating from Moscow is the PAK-DA is now Russia’s answer to this more modern US development.

Despite supposedly being a priority, the PAK-DA has been developing for over two decades.  Depending on which Russian official statement you believe, the design was ultimately finalized in 2009. Dates again vary, but the more recent projections were for an aircraft that could have begun testing in 2023, for acceptance tests by the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) to commence in 2026, with production to be initiated in 2027.

PAK DA: Mission Impossible

Specialists in Moscow, with collective decades in the Russian military aircraft sector, tell 19FortyFive that there are basic factors that explain why the PAK DA program constantly shifts to the right – as well as why it could conceivably never see the light of day. 

Several points that more than one of these experts make demonstrate that bringing this program to fruition is an impossible task:

–During the 1990s, when Russian defense budgets virtually collapsed, the Mikoyan and Sukhoi companies that produce fighter airplanes could survive on export sales.  

Russia never sold its Tupolev bomber designs to foreign customers, which caused most of the workforce to wither away gradually.  

One former long-time specialist at one of the major design bureau stated, “you cannot design a major military aircraft with the number of people who are left at the company – even if every one of them is some kind of a genius.”

–This has left the company with a design team that is inexperienced and has no experience with a flying wing concept in particular.  

An airplane with no vertical control surfaces requires extensive resources in the software programming part of the industry to write the code for the aircraft’s flight control system. 

These specialists are in short supply as many have left the defense sector – or have left Russia altogether.

–The Kazan plant to build the aircraft suffers from every kind of shortfall in needed resources imaginable, to include modern machinery, high-quality composite materials, high-strength steel, and electronic components.  

The Kuznetsov aero-engine firm that manufactures the engines went nearly bankrupt in the early 2000s and has very similar problems.  

A new facility in Samara, Russia now carries the entire load for producing nearly all of the engines used in the entire VKS bomber fleet.

Being Stealthy

Finally, the entire point of the flying wing design is to be stealthy, but the shape of the aircraft is not enough. 

In the U.S., the primary aircraft firms use specialized composite radar-absorbing materials (RAM) where the stealthy qualities are “baked in” at the autoclave.

Russian industry has instead relied since the 1990s on technology developed at a specialized facility, the Scientific Centre for Applied Problems of Electrodynamics (SCAPE). This technique relies on the aircraft surface being treated with external coatings and appliques in post-production.

A U.S. analyst of stealthy designs explains to 19FortyFive that “external treatments of this kind are effective up to a point, but they do not provide the level of survivability that is needed in a strategic platform. It is one of the many capabilities that prevent the Russian industry from completing this program.”

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson 

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw and has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defence technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided at one time or another in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.