At the beginning of December, only minor equipment was stolen from the Il-80 “doomsday plane”, valuable equipment is stored separately, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC, part of Rostec) said on Saturday, December 26.
“The plane arrived in Taganrog for scheduled work. All special equipment was dismantled from the aircraft immediately upon arrival and is stored in special rooms. As a result of the incident, a number of blocks of secondary equipment disappeared, not related to the direct functional purpose of the aircraft, ”the UAC told TASS.
The corporation noted that an investigation is underway on the fact of the incident, a comprehensive check of the circumstances of the incident is organized.
UAC representatives added that after the incident, the access regime to the airfield was additionally toughened, measures were taken to strengthen the security regime of the enterprise. As the corporation explained, the Taganrog-Yuzhny airfield is separated from the TANTK production complex by a fence and can only be accessed with a separate pass.
“The factory perimeter is guarded by a separate structure not related to the security of the airfield. The airfield is guarded by the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “UVO of the Ministry of Transport of Russia”. JSC “RT-Okhrana” is engaged in the protection of the factory perimeter, – emphasized in the UAC.
On December 4, it became known that the attackers had opened the plane’s cargo door and stolen radio equipment worth more than a million rubles. 39 radio station blocks and five more boards from five of the same dismantled blocks disappeared from the aircraft compartments. The suspects’ fingerprints were left on the surface of the cargo hatch in one of the aircraft compartments and on the switchgear cover thrown inside. In addition, the traces of their shoes remained in the compartments.
The definition of “Yom Kippur aircraft” appeared in the United States – the so-called aircraft that was supposed to evacuate the country’s top military leadership in the event of a threat, for example in the event of a nuclear war, and become the command center of the armed forces in the sky. The functions of such points in the United States are performed by the E-4B based on the Boeing 747.
The “air command post” in the Soviet Union was the Il-80, developed in the late 1980s at the Ilyushin Design Bureau on the basis of the Il-86 passenger aircraft. It took off for the first time in 1985, and its operation began in 1992.
Since 1987, a total of four such boards have been produced. The IL-80 has onboard protection against weapons of mass destruction, including radioactive contamination, the aircraft is equipped with equipment that provides control of all types of armed forces.