It costs less than half of the American Tomahawk, uses the engine of an old Czech trainer plane and aerodynamics from the 1960s. But it works and, produced in hundreds of copies per month, it is becoming the Russians’ nightmare.
Transforming its economy into a war economy is what Ukraine has done starting from 2022, also managing to change and modernize the arms industry. The Flamingo missile is probably the most important demonstration of this: powerful, effective and low cost compared to Western and Russian weapons. But to achieve this, the Ukrainians exploited something already present in the nation’s “DNA”, that is, a historically rooted aeronautical culture and industry: Ukraine is the home of famous factories such as Antonov, Aeroprakt, Motor Sich, Ivchenko-Progress and many others which in the past had formed the backbone of the Soviet aeronautical industry. And if in the past projects were disconnected from the technological evolution of consumer electronics and globalization, in the last four years exactly the opposite has happened and the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile is precisely the result of this transformation. It is a land-launched cruise bomb created by the Fire Point company, which previewed it on August 18, 2025. It is armed with a 1,150 kg warhead and has enough autonomy to reach a range of 3,000 km. But above all it is easy to build to the point that the production rate exceeds two hundred units per month. Fire Point had brought together personnel from sectors such as video games, and it emerged that it was the help of British military specialists that took the weapon from prototype status to operational effectiveness. The Ukrainians did not start from scratch: there is a similarity between the Flamingo and the FP-5 advertised by the English Milanion Group (a company that appears to be financed by Emirati capital), which appeared at the Idex defense fair in 2025. A similarity that concerns at least the aesthetic and configuration terms. Nothing, therefore, prevents us from thinking that Fire Point acts with the technology and experience of this company. According to what appeared in the international press, it would seem that around 90% of the assembly takes place in Ukraine. What is certain, however, is that with such a range and war load capacity the Flamingo, launched from the territory controlled by Kiev, could threaten almost all the major Russian weapons factories and a good percentage of the energy plants and regional military bases of Moscow. Coming back to the shape, this cruise missile features a fixed wing (like a small airplane) and the turbofan (jet) engine installed on top of the fuselage. But in terms of aerodynamics it resembles the Soviet-era Tupolev 141-143 drones, which before 1991, when the USSR dissolved, were produced in Ukraine. And even the rear “X” control surfaces are a detail that harks back to the Zala, among the first “orbiting munitions” made by Russia. The containment of production costs is achieved by using noble materials only where needed while components such as the fuselage and others are made of fibreglass, a solution which is also simple and quick to work with and above all transparent to radar. To the point that we are talking about a construction process that completes a fuselage in just six hours.
The industrial question
If what was announced at Idex 2025 is still true, the engine is the now dated Ivchenko AI-25 designed sixty years ago and also used to equip Soviet bloc trainer airplanes such as the Czech Aero L-39 Albatros, produced over time by the Ukrainian company Motor Sich in hundreds of examples. Considering that airplane engines have a limited life, Fire Point’s idea was to acquire a certain number of them with still about ten hours of guaranteed operation, just enough for testing and launch. Compared to the US Tomahawk, the Flamingo weighs approximately 2.5 times the war load. Still analyzing shapes and volumes, the warhead could be made up of a 925 kg Mark 84 high explosive bomb or an originally anti-tank Blu-109/B. The latest episodes of Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure suggest that in the last 12 months the missile’s navigation system has been improved and although it remains a subsonic weapon (it flies at around 900 km/h), today it would be equipped with an elaborate and mixed guidance system, including satellite, inertial and visual guidance navigation. As for precision, we are talking about fifteen meters compared to the programmed point. We might therefore think that the Flamingo is better than the Tomahawk, but in reality the efficiency of a weapon system also takes into account factors such as launch preparation time, here on average over 30 minutes. It is also complex to determine the exact cost, but according to the major intelligence sites the figure would fluctuate between 550,000 and one million dollars depending on the configuration to be prepared, or almost half of the American competitor. If we consider the effectiveness, it seems that the Russians have so far shot down around 30% of the launched specimens. Analyzing all available information, it therefore appears that the United Kingdom or other NATO nations supply less than 12% of the missile’s components, and that everything else is of Ukrainian origin including the fuel: solid for the rocket that initially launches it, liquid for the cruise engine. In the last few hours, the Financial Times reported that the German company Diehl Defense is negotiating a contract with Fire Point for the production of part of the components in Germany, as an alternative to cruise missiles produced in the USA.
