World War I Tactics Make A Comeback As A Ukrainian Gunner In The Back Of A Propeller Plane Shoots Down A Russian Drone

6 comments

1. No way lol that Yak-52 wasn’t a drone lol I really thought they just called that drone a yak52 because it looked like the real thing just with a mounted machine gun , lol it was a real plane , Holly shit , Ukraine ain’t playing no games

   🇺🇦✊

2. Didn’t have that on my 2024 Bingo card.

3. If it works its not stupid!

4. Unlike Muscovy, Ukraine is CREATIVE. They’ll turn stunt planes with a machinegun into a deadly air-defence weapon, because the alternative is total annihilation at the hands of Putin’s rape squads.

5. Very cost effective solution. Hopefully they can deploy more.

   Wasn’t there an article about Ukraine having a drone with a built in machine gun?

6. Operational consequences are actually quite severe.

   The great advantage of aerial based anti-air and ordinance delivery is covering large areas. One Gepard with it’s fancy ammo covers a small 2-3km bubble at most. It has poor line of sight. It is not mobile. On the ground, you can’t travel as the crow flies. Even in a manpad on a pickup truck, you likely can intercept but can’t close on even Shaheds. You might max out at 80mph on average if the road is almost empty, so you have an effective speed of maybe 60mph considering that roads aren’t straight.

   By comparison, most light aircraft, even when not being picky, can hit about 150mph with plenty of examples clearing 200mph. Everything that can’t be chased down is more expensive, up to cruise missiles with turbine engines going about 550mph. While a stinger is short ranged, they close at mach 2.5, so the issue is almost entirely getting them to the intercept point. If you’re hunting cruise missiles, light aircraft are a game changing weapons delivery platform.

   The actual envelope for propeller driven can realistically hit 45k ft with fancy two-stage compression and about 400mph at low levels. 45k ft is glide bomb altitude. One reason Ukraine doesn’t develop aircraft is because turbines are expensive. IC engines are relatively low-tech manufacturing and not nearly as expensive as gas turbines. Export models of all kinds are available COTS, even if you want to max out the envelope.

   The only challenge closer to the front is that longer-range look-down shoot-down capable Russian fighters are a problem. The R-77 I guess is the most likely air-to-air missile and has about 75km range firing from high to low altitude, and most of that will be effective against a slower moving target. Pilots are gold, and this might be a better job for drones.

   At the longer ranges that glide bombs are launched at or when flying low in intercept missions, achieving sufficient low-observability is probably not that high tech at this point. We’ve seen over and over, because of how consumer tech has upended tactics, weird combinations of technologies that were beyond remote control or automation in the past are finding niches at certain cost and capability points.