Posts Tagged ‘Russia/Ukraine war’

Big Drones

April 4, 2024

It looks like Ukraine has started making big drones at home. According to a couple of Forbes articles, they converted a civilian sport plane that they then flew into a Russian drone factory some 600 miles from the border.

Once again we see Ukrainian innovation, leveraging aeronautical engineering know-how in the face of resource constraints. People tend to think of Ukraine as a country of mostly farmers, growing wheat and sunflowers. They forget that it was a center of Soviet aerospace innovation, back in the day, with modern Antonov airlifters like the AN-124 and AN-224 being designed and built in both Kyiv and Kharkiv, and satellites, control systems and rocket engines being designed and built in Dnipro, AKA Rocket City. The facilities are gone, destroyed by the Russians, but the brains remain.

By all accounts, this was the simplest of shade-tree conversions, perhaps a day to install and half a day to remove and convert back to civilian use, assuming you wanted to. We can expect future versions to have longer ranges and greater payload, thus allowing the Ukrainians to strike deeper into Russia, including perhaps the petroleum processing facilities like Samara, or Ufa, in the eastern part of European Russia. Once those go off line and a good hard freeze cracks the pipelines, the Russians will lose a good fraction of their total oil production.

The other lesson to be learned is that the Russian air defense system is surprisingly brittle. It provides a cordon defense along (some) of the border, but if that is penetrated — say, by a small, low-flying, mostly fabric drone — there’s nothing to protect the core. Oh, there’s (some) point defense of (some) major cities, but once you have penetrated to the interior you can toddle around to your heart’s content until you find a really deep, really important target. And although drones like this don’t carry much in the way of payload, they don’t need to. You don’t have to carpet bomb a refinery any more. You just pick out the most important part of the most important catalytic cracking tower, and set off your explosives right on top of it.

Advanced Russian aviation technology

March 3, 2024

Over on YouTube is a four minute vid from UK Forces News channel on lessons learned from the air war in Ukraine. It is illustrated by lots of stock footage of advanced Russian aircraft, mostly the MiG-31 Foxhound, but including the most advanced Russian bomber, the TU-160/Blackjack.  One interesting shot is of what appears be a TU-160 defensive systems operator, preparing to operate his advanced technology defensive systems, once he gets his calculations right.