RIP Russian Laser Plane
A Ukrainian attack on a Russian airbase appears to have claimed a rare airborne laser testbed.
It wasn’t just any aircraft that went up in flames in Ukraine’s bold attack on a Russian airfield this week — it was a relic of the Soviet Union’s earliest high-energy laser weapon dreams.
According to the Ukrainian military, a long-range strike inside Russian territory on November 25 involving Neptune cruise missiles and jet-powered drones launched by Ukraine’s 1st Center of the Unmanned Systems Forces appeared to destroy the Russian Air Force’s sole remaining A-60 airborne laser laboratory, a modified Ilyushin Il-76MD transport aircraft originally developed in the 1970s as a testbed for airborne laser weapons.
The aircraft was stationed at the Beriev Aircraft Company factory airfield at the Taganrog/Tsentralnyy military installation in the Rostov Oblast region in southwest Russia. Its destruction was subsequently confirmed by satellite imagery.
Beriev is known for its work developing special-purpose aircraft for the Russian military, including not just the A-60 but the A-50 and next-generation A-100 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) platforms, a prototype for the latter of which was also reportedly destroyed in the Ukrainian attack.
The strike doesn’t just highlight Kyiv’s expanding ability to put high-value Russian targets at risk far behind the front lines of Moscow’s ongoing invasion, but also underscores how the rise of drone warfare continues to upend assumptions about what assets are survivable. And in that context, the loss of the A-60 aircraft represents a powerful blow to Russia’s directed energy ambitions.
The first experimental A-60, designated ‘1A’ and originally designed to neutralize high-altitude balloons, made its first flight in August 1981, its one-megawatt carbon dioxide laser weapon with a purported 25-mile range integrated into the aircraft’s cargo hold, according to a detailed history from The War Zone. After that aircraft was destroyed in an accidental fire at Russia’s Chkalovsky airfield in 1989, a second experimental A-60, designated ‘1A2,’ commenced testing in August 1991 before trials were suspended two years later in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Like most laser projects, the A-60 laser lab didn’t stay mothballed for long. The airborne laser project resumed in December 2002 under the Russian Ministry of Defense’s “Sokol-Eshelon” research and development program aimed building a system for blinding satellites in orbit. Flight trials began again in 2006 and culminated with a 2009 experiment during which the aircraft targeted the Japanese satellite Ajisai at an altitude of roughly 1,500 kilometers (932 miles), per The War Zone.
While the second A-60 has occasionally been spotted operating around Taganrog in the intervening years, little information has been available regarding the status of the system since 2019, when Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Alexsei Krivoruchko stated that “work is underway on high-power lasers of various types … [and] it is planned to put it on an airplane in the coming years.”
The destruction of the A-60 laser laboratory marks a symbolic end of Russia’s decades-long attempts to field an operational airborne laser — a dream that, for all its Cold War ambition, never materialized. In this regard, it somewhat mirrors the fate of the US Air Force’s YAL-1 Airborne Laser Test Bed, the Boeing 747-based chemical laser designed to intercept ballistic missiles which, first flown in 2002, was ultimately canceled in 2011 after years of cost overruns and limited operational relevance. Both aircraft were high-concept, chemically fueled behemoths, exquisite platforms built for exquisite missions in an era before compact electric lasers, advanced thermal management, and adaptive optics — strategic science experiments more than deployable systems. And now, both are gone.
Despite decades of advances, airborne laser weapons remain technically daunting. Maintaining beam quality in turbulent, high-altitude environments requires advanced optics, power and cooling constraints often limit dwell time and effectiveness, and targeting a fast-moving object from another fast-moving platform requires precision guidance that, until recently, simply wasn’t feasible in a compact, reliable form factor.
The pursuit of airborne laser weapons is, of course, far from over. The US has shifted its focus to smaller, podded systems for fighter jets and long-endurance drones, albeit with mixed results, while advanced militaries like China and Israel have increasingly pursued modular systems to potentially knock incoming missiles out of the sky. The future of airborne directed energy appears to be trending toward smaller, smarter, and cheaper weapons rather than massive retrofitted airframes built around a single beam — assuming that future ever actually comes to pass.
And that makes the A-60’s demise all the more appropriate. Like the YAL-1, it was built on a foundation of Cold War techno-optimism: big, expensive, and designed to dazzle both satellites and enemy commanders. But in the end, it was destroyed not by another exquisite weapon system but by drones and cruise missiles — a fitting end to a hulking monument to a different era of warfare.
RIP, Russian laser plane. You were weird, you were ambitious, and now you’re very, very dead.
Superb analysis of what this loss really represents for Russia's directed energy program. The parallel to the YAL-1 is particularly apt, both were products of an era when the answer to technical limitations was simply building bigger platforms rather than solving fundamental physics problems. The irony you highlight is striking: a megaproject designed to dazzle satellites gets destroyed by comparatively cheap drones and cruise missiles, perfectly illustrating why the industry is moving toward modular pod-mounted systems. The thermal management and beam stability challenges you mention remain the core bottleneck even for next-generation platforms. Curious whether any Russian research data from the A-60 program will survive in archived form, or if this marks a true end to that partcular developmental branch.