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.
Slava Ukraini.
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.
I’m just waiting for someone to use one of these for an assassination attempt in a western country. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t happened yet considering Ukraine has shown how effective they are.
Not wishing at all. As soon as it happens, they’ll outlaw all drones. They won’t be covered under the 2nd amendment of course.
They won’t be covered under the 2nd amendment of COurse.
What if I strap a gun? Then it’s patriotic and family friendly!
I would be absolutely astonished if as part of the no-fly zone established at these rallies that they don’t have frequency jammers at the very minimum.
I feel it’s only a matter of time before they put a plexiglass bunker surrounding the president at the very least.
Imagine if that guy who tried to shoot trump, actually used a drone. I don’t know how these things work, but I assume they have more than 1 missile per drone. So then imagine he just opened fire on a large scale crowd.
And because it’s a drone, he could be like 2 miles away. With the right escape plan, he could have been in Mexico long before anyone ever traced it back to him.
From Mexico, he could move pretty much anywhere with an alias.
He could have committed a large scale terrorist attack, AND gotten away with it. At least for a while. I mean, even Bin Laden EVENTUALLY was found.
That’s not really how they use these drones, or how you would use a drone to assassinate someone. For the case of Trump you’d use a FPV drone that weights maybe 750 grams and can lift an extra 400gramms of whatever payload. And then you just kamikaze it into the target. It’s pretty easy and cheap. A drone like that if you build it yourself is maybe 250 bucks on the low end and maybe 400 for a long range drone. These things are fast as fuck and you can be a good km away from the target. If you are even a mediocre pilot it’s pretty hard to miss. I don’t know shit about explosives, and how you would make it go boom, but just flying a 500g drone into someone’s face at 100kmh surely sends a message.
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…
An apt analogy for the war as a whole.
