Indonesia will not decide on the choice of new fighters in any way. Yesterday, August 11, the portal defenseworld.net He announced that Indonesia is returning its engineers to the headquarters of the KAI company to continue work on the promising KF-21 aircraft.
Indonesia entered the KFX/IFX fighter program in 2012, but later overdue several payments, and in 2020 returned its engineers to their homeland, allegedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, South Korea has built the first prototype of the aircraft, called the KF-21 Boramae, and is preparing it for flight tests. Now it has become known that 32 Indonesian engineers have returned to Korea, and soon their number will approach a hundred. At the same time, the issue of overdue payments has not yet been resolved.
The first prototype of the Korean fighter KF-21 Boramae
Image source: koreaaero.com
In 2015, the Russian Su-35 won the tender to replace the outdated Northrop F-5, but its purchase stalled due to sanctions. In 2020, when Indonesia recalled its engineers from South Korea, there were rumors that the country intended to withdraw from the KFX/IFX project by purchasing French Rafale fighters.
The aircraft, formerly known as KFX, is being developed as a national project of South Korea and should become the main fighter of the Air Force of this country, as well as Indonesia, which has pledged to assume 20% of the development costs.
As previously reported in the press service of KAI, the KF-21 is equipped with two engines. With a fuselage length of 16.9 m, a width of 11.2 m and a height of 4.7 m, it is similar in size to the F-18 fighter. The maximum speed is Mach 1.81 (2200 km / h), the range is 2900 km, the payload is 7.7 tons.
