Aquí hay algo más, pero no especifica el estado actual del proyecto.
http://www.aeronautics.ru/ekipgal.htm
Aquí en cambio (2007) se habla de que saldrá adelante... con la cooperación económinca de los EEUU. Manda güevos:
http://www.ufocasebook.com/ekip.html
For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space. But financial woes have frozen progress on the pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship, dubbed the Ekip (short for ecology and progress).
Momentum on the project may pick up again soon, however. After an introduction from an American congressman, the Ekip's designers at the Saratov Aviation Plant have a new partner: the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, which has agreed to join in the development of the unorthodox drone over the next several years. Test flights are tentatively scheduled for 2007 at Webster Field, near Patuxent River.
The initial prototype will be only 500 pounds -- just a speck compared with the 12-ton craft that Saratov claims to have successfully test flown in the early 1990s.
"But if we can make it work, it'll allow for new, radical concepts in aircraft design," said Dr. John Fischer, NAVAIR's director of research and engineering sciences.
Odd-shaped objects are often difficult to push through the air, because the airflow around them gets so disjointed. And the Ekip certainly qualifies as odd.
But Fischer claims that the Ekip's designers have figured out a way to create a vacuum around the drone's surface, which keeps the air flowing around it.
Traducido: "metemos las narices, copiamos todo lo que podamos y luego presentemos un proyecto "propio" al margen del ruso y digamos que lo de Rusia se limita a copiar a occidente".
Saludos.
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