It may be the first time a drone has destroyed a helicopter in mid-air.
Ukrainian forces deploy more than 100,000 explosive first-person-view drones a month all along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 28-month wider war on Ukraine. The drones smash into armored vehicles, chase down exposed infantry and follow artillery fire back to its origin in order to target Russian howitzers.
And today one of the small quadcopter drones—remotely steered by an operator wearing a virtual-reality headset—shot down a Russian helicopter, apparently for the first time.
Photos and videos that circulated on social media depict the Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter burning near Donetsk in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. “A speedy recovery to the survivors,” one Russian blogger wrote.
This new use of explosive drones has been a long time coming. As long ago as September, Ukrainian operators first tried ramming their flying robots into Russian helicopters mid-flight. The drone threat got so serious that the Russian air force began assigning some helicopters to escort other helicopters.
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Slava Ukraini.
Fuck Ukraine, Fuck Russia, Slava Anarchii
I mean, if Ukraine wants to start the anarchist revolution I’m not going to complain but I don’t think it’s likely. You’re just both-siding a fascist invasion.
An apt analogy for the war as a whole.
Weight is just a number, guys. Even the skinniest of us can score!
Not that I’m skinny, but… Nevermind.
I’d be interested in the cost difference as well.
Mi8 has a pricetag of 15 million, excluding crew and whatever it was carrying. If that drone was on the expensive side it was 15K. So a factor >1000
Uh, that was a good purchase then.
I am the skinniest of us. Can confirm.
Haven’t gotten to do one of these for a while…
If you post that every time Russia loses an aircraft to Ukraine, Riker is going to be out of breath.
Only when they lose a manned aircraft because of a two-pound drone.
Virtual Riker never gets tired. Sour notes for days!
Anti-air-drones. Fuck yeah.
Bringing down a helicopter is just a matter of removing the miracle that keeps it up there. I’ve always been wary of them, but after seeing that one tragic Ring video of the small helicopter that just came apart in midair and a straight plummet down. Never. I mean they are great strategically, but when they fail…it’s pretty complete.
FYI it’s not a miracle keeping it up there, it’s science.
And no, any failure is not “pretty complete”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
The most common use of autorotation in helicopters is to safely land the aircraft in the event of an engine failure or tail-rotor failure. It is a common emergency procedure taught to helicopter pilots as part of their training.
So you haven’t seen the video?
Autorotation was…not an option.
They don’t actually fly. They’re just so ugly that the Earth repels them.
I used to be scared to fly in a helicopter. Then I learned how they fly. Now I’m scared when they fly overhead.
It’s just lift vs drag and rotation!
Knew a carrier based Navy search and rescue swimmer, he always said “Helicopters don’t fly, they beat gravity into submission.”
You almost made me snort peas.
Have you heard of the jesus nut?
Yep, but a single mission critical part and everything else being survivable is a far cry from “any failure is pretty complete”.
True.
Still scary af though :-)
i cant wait until actual war machine countries start producing the drone swarm en masse. (this is sarcasm)
Well congratulations you already waited long enough. The US is producing them.
yayyy cant wait til im swarmed after an AI thinks im gonna commit a crime
100k drones a month?!
This is a surprisingly hight number :o. Then again saying this already feels stupid since the answer is probaby just industrial warfare or smth.
Wasn’t the last US aid package some 60 Billion dollars or so? Assuming thats for a year, that would make it about 5 Billion a month. So even if every drone would cost 5.000 Dollars, it would add up to about 10% of that budget.
And from what things in Ukraine look like, we hit a new era of warfare, with a change similiar in scope to the invention of the machinegun.
Commercial quads are 200-500 bucks. Ukraine has been making their own which significantly reduces cost. A somewhat comparable piece of equipment, the switchblade, is between 60-80k per drone and is only effective against infantry and light vehicles. The US MIC must be frothing mad right now.
The US MIC doesn’t give a fuck because the DOD will never pay a reasonable price for anything, ever.
That’s not really true. All that stuff about “$50K toilets! $5K screwdrivers!” includes shipping and installation in a warzone. Try asking for that on Task Rabbit and see what price you get.
Considering they’re basically guided munitions at this point, it makes sense.
Exploding drones. They’re basically ordinance.
It reminds me of the eternal war in Civ 2 where whenever there is a build up of an army they just get targeted and nuked. Eternal War
John Barnes got a whole lot right in Kaleidoscope Century more than 25 years ago.
A helicopter can fly faster than 150 miles per hour at altitudes exceeding thousands of feet—too fast and too high for a two-pound drone to get a clean shot without an enormous degree of skill or luck on the part of the operator.
They spotted the 12-ton, three-crew Russian helicopter—which performs attack, transport and medical-evacuation missions—while it was still close to the ground. “Caught at the moment of takeoff,” a Russian blogger reported.
There are quads that can do 200+mph these days, only a matter of time before they’re cheap enough to be used to hunt down the helis.
Doubtful they can do that at the same altitudes as a helicopter though
Doesn’t it get easier to fly fast high up? It does for planes.
It does, but it gets progressivelly harder as it goes up to maintain enough vertical airflow for a rotary-wing craft to stay up because the air becomes thinner.
The going faster for fixed wing craft compensates for the air being thinner because the Bernouli Effect (the sustentation effect from the wings) gets stronger the faster the airflow over the wings is, but the equivalent of that for a rotary wing craft is for the paddles themselves to rotate faster and the craft itself going faster doesn’t help (it makes air over some paddles go faster but also makes the air over the paddles going in the opposite direction go slower).
Quadcopters are rotary-wing craft, so can’t really improve the altitude they can reach by going faster.
Ah. So it’s less that they’re slow at altitude, and more that they may not be able to reach it in the first place.
It does for space craft too. At least thats what No Mans Sky has taught me! Gotta turn on the thrusters!!!
Yeah but they’re much more vulnerable to SAMs at altitude.
while carrying a payload
It’s be great if we cooled it with the chasing of infantry. If you’re chasing, then they’re running, and if they’re running away from ya it’s a war crime.
I know, I know: Russia has been the poster-child for war crimes, with Israel. But we need to be people still at the end of this. So just maybe we don’t say “chasing”.
MFW the Geneva conventions are optional.
That’s not true, it’s a war crime to shoot at enemies who have surrendered. Running away isn’t surrendering. There’s no way to tell if an enemy is running away to withdraw to better cover or because they intend to cease being a combatant all together. That’s why we have the requirement of surrender. If they were waving a white flag and got bombed, you’d have a point, but that’s clearly not what was described.
It’s even more brutal than that. There’s no requirement for air forces to take surrender into account because they cannot reasonably or effectively accept a surrender.
The Ukrainian drones that have led surrendering Russians back to where they can be taken into custody is way above and beyond what’s required.
no requirement for air forces
To also identify and separate combatants and non-combatants before carpet-bombing? If you can’t spot one, you can’t spot the other.
That’s in regards to proportional force, not the rules around surrendering forces. They absolutely have to restrict themselves to proportional force.
But its better for Ukraina if the Russian soldier can trust that they can surrender safely so that they, hopefully more people do it.
Absolutely.
The only winners in this war have been the Chinese drone part makers on Alibaba and the intermediaries in the Middle East/Central Asia buying those parts and reselling them to Ukraine/Russia.
Fuck the smelly orcs and vatniks as always.
The Russian military has hundreds of helicopters and, so far, has lost just a hundred or so to Ukrainian action.
Odd use of “only”. Based on that sentence alone, they’ve lost between 10% and 90%, which sounds like a lot…
Not to mention, if they’re anything like their fighters or their tanks, only a small fraction was really in operational condition, the rest stored for parts.