The Korean Folks’s Army Air Drive has for the primary time acquired lively radar guided air-to-air missiles, with these seen built-in onto a MiG-29 squadron and take a look at fired. The service’s MiG-29s, which had been procured from the Soviet Union within the Nineteen Eighties and subsequently produced underneath licence domestically within the Nineteen Nineties, beforehand geared up solely with comparatively out of date R-27 semi-active guided missiles for past visible vary air-to-air fight. Though innovative when launched within the early Nineteen Eighties, Chilly Warfare period variants of the R-27 are thought of a number of generations behind probably the most succesful fashionable missiles such because the Chinese language PL-15 or American AIM-260. North Korea’s new air-to-air missile class seems to profit from lively radar steering, and carefully resembles fashionable missile courses in service overseas such because the PL-15. The missile class was first unveiled on the Nationwide Defence Improvement Exhibition Self Defence 2021 in October 2021, and will probably be built-in onto the nation’s MiG-23ML and MiG-21bis fighters alongside its MiG-29s. The sophistication of North Korea’s surface-to-air missile courses, as demonstrated by exams of techniques such because the Pyongae-6, present an essential indication that most of the applied sciences wanted for a sophisticated lengthy vary air-to-air missile class are already at mature levels.
The ageing sensors on North Korea’s present fighters has raised the chance that the brand new missile class is meant to make use of concentrating on information from the nation’s rather more superior floor primarily based air defence radars and from its giant AEW&C ‘flying radar’ plane that was accomplished earlier in 2025. The combination of a brand new class of air-to-air missile into service is especially important as the chance has grown that North Korea will procure extra fighter plane from Russia, with modernised MiG-29s and presumably Su-57 fifth technology fighters although to be among the many most certainly to be transferred. The commissioning of fighters with fashionable electronically scanned array radars would permit the fleet to make fuller use of recent lengthy vary radar guided missile courses. Modernised MiG-29s can’t solely profit from newly developed extra environment friendly RD-33 collection 3 engines and expanded gasoline carrying capacities, but in addition glass cockpits, and both the broadly used Zhuk-ME PESA radar or the newer Zhuk-A/AM AESA radar. These upgrades make them much more appropriate for past visible vary fight within the 2020s. Enhanced MiG-29s additionally combine helmet mounted sights, which might permit them to make efficient use of North Korea’s new quick vary air-to-air missile class, which was additionally unveiled in October 2021.
