Fire Point makes ‘hundreds’ of drones daily, company says
FP-1 strike drone (Photo: REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko)
Ukrainian defense contractor Fire
Point produced about 100 Flamingo cruise missiles a month and “hundreds” of
FP-1 and FP-2 drones a day, company CEO Iryna Terekh said in an interview with The
Guardian on July 27.
Terekh said the Flamingo production rate is sufficient to sustain a campaign of long-range strikes on targets located hundreds of kilometers inside Russia.
“I’m not aware of any deep strike attack that was happening in the past few months that was not involving our products,” she told The Guardian.
She said a Flamingo can carry about 1,150 kilograms of explosives. Production of a single missile costs about $600,000, significantly cheaper than U.S. Tomahawk missiles, which cost about $3.5 million each. Terekh said Flamingo’s actual range is roughly 1,800 kilometers.
Terekh added that FP-1 drones cost $55,000 to $75,000 each and have a range greater than 1,600 kilometers but carry much lighter payloads.
“Fire Point now operates from 83 factories inside Ukraine, plus another in Denmark, employing 6,000 people, up from 3,500 late last year, according to Terekh,” the newspaper added.
“The Guardian visited one manufacturing site last December,
where dozens of men were assembling the plywood, plastic and carbon fibre
structures into whole drones.”
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