The Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) of South Korea announced that the KF-21 Boramae succeeded in its first test flight at the Third Training Wing of the Republic of Korea Air Force near South Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) in Sacheon, South Gyeongsang Province, July 19.
The DAPA explained that it checked not only the KF-21’s basic take-off and landing, but its flight control at a constant speed in this test flight.
The homegrown fighter recorded its first successful flight about 22 years after President Kim Dae-jung announced the government’s intention to develop a state-of-the-art fighter of South Korea’s own know-how in November 2000, and six and a half years since DAPA started developing the fighter in 2016.
Through the successful test flight, South Korea became the 13th country to develop a domestically produced fighter jet and the 8th country to develop a supersonic fighter.
The KF-21 is 16.9 meters long, 4.7 meters tall and 11.2 meters wide. The sleek jet can achieve a flight speed of 1.8 times the speed of sound. Moreover, it can carry a total of 7.7 tons of weapons including four medium-range air-to-air missiles and two short-range air-to-air missiles.
The KF-21 is capable of launching air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground missile, which means that it has strong flexibility in fighter armament.
Even though South Korea was unable to develop missiles for fighters, it could not do so due to interoperability problems. The South Korean Air Force has mainly used U.S.-made fighters thus far.
However, if the KF-21 is mass-produced, the Korean Air Force will be able to develop missiles independently from such restrictions.
In particular, military experts believe that the development of the KF-21 will make a great contribution to South Korean defense industry’s exports, because various advanced weapons can be developed for South Korea’s own interests in addition to missiles.
In addition to the fact that the KF-21 can be equipped with a wide array of weapons, a big advantage of the KF-21 is that it has the best specifications for a 4.5th-generation fighter, as shown by its flight speed of 1.8 times the speed of sound.
The KF-21 still has a long way to go before volume production can be started. But many experts believe that the KF-21 has a bright future, as South Korea has independently developed the core technologies for production of supersonic fighters.
Although the United States refused to transfer its core technologies for advanced fighters, South Korean researchers, engineers and developers developed key parts - an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, an infrared search and tracking (IRST) system, an electro-optical targeting pod (EO TGP) and a radio frequency (RF) jammer.
An AESA radar detects and tracks multiple targets in the air, on land, and at sea at the same time.
An IRST system detects and tracks infrared signals from air-to-air targets, and an EO TGP is used to find and follow targets in the air and on the ground.
An RF jammer fires flares that can evade heat-seeking missiles in order to detect and disrupt enemy radar signals.
South Korea began the fighter development program with the goal of producing an advanced multirole fighter for the South Korean and Indonesian Air Forces, by partnering with Indonesia.
The KF-21’s airframe is stealthier than any 4.5-generation fighter, but does not carry weapons in internal bays like fifth-generation fighters, though internal bays may be introduced later in development.
In April 2021, KAI took the wraps off the first prototype of the KF-21 during a rollout ceremony at its headquarters at Sacheon Airport. The fighter jet was officially given the name Boramae (fighting hawk in Korean) at the time.
Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), the manufacturer of the KF-21, will test the fighter through about 2,000 test flights along with the verification of its performance and weapon capabilities.
In 2026, it will wrap up the development stage of the fighter and began mass production in earnest.
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