A Russian drone operator’s view of the Ukrainian Yak-52 and its back-seat gunner.
Russian army seize
Russians are getting actually fed up with the Ukrainian crew of that Yakovlev Yak-52 coaching airplane that has been dogfighting with, and capturing down, Russian surveillance drones—World War I-style.
In three months, two aviators driving in a Yak-52—a front-seat pilot and a back-seat gunner—have taken out not less than 12 Russian drones, when you consider the kill markings the crew has painted on the facet of the 1970s-vintage airplane.
“Isn’t it time to shoot him down?” one Russian blogger wrote.
The drawback for the Russians is {that a} Yak-52 is difficult to knock down for a similar cause it’s an efficient platform for a shotgun-armed crew member taking potshots at close by drones. The Yakovlev is strong and inconspicuous.
A propeller-driven Yak-52 doesn’t paint a really large image on the radar screens of Russia’s beleaguered long-range air protection batteries. And even when you harm a Yak-52 by, say, ramming it with a drone—the crew might most likely nonetheless land the airplane.
Earlier this month, one other Russian blogger complained concerning the Yak-52 crew “firing at our UAVs like it’s a shooting gallery” over town of Odesa in southern Ukraine.
It wasn’t a brand new drawback. Apparently trying to find an environment friendly technique of eliminating $100,000 Russian drones with out firing a $4-million Patriot missile or another dear air protection munition, again in April the Ukrainians started taking to the air in that Yak-52, maneuvering to inside shotgun vary of intruding drones—and blasting them out of the air.
It labored so properly that, earlier this month, the Ukrainian intelligence directorate started coaching gunners to hunt Russian unmanned aerial automobiles from locally-made Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes. The Yakovlev crew’s profitable hunts have impressed an entire new anti-drone tactic.
The Russians are shedding persistence as their losses pile up. “The Yak-52 flew over Odessa and with high efficiency shot down our reconnaissance UAVs for a week, causing laughter in some circles,” the blogger wrote. “This has not been funny to UAV operators and us for a long time.”
But it’s not clear what the Russian army can do concerning the Yak-52. Its patrol zone is not less than 50 miles from the closest Russian place. But the closest Russian air protection batteries are most likely a lot farther away, as Ukrainian drone and missile raids proceed to deplete their numbers and drive them farther from the entrance line.
In any occasion, a Yak-52 could be powerful to detect. One 1976 study discovered {that a} Cessna 172—a propeller airplane just like a Yak-52 in measurement and form—presents a radar cross-section of lower than a sq. meter from sure angles. That’s 1 / 4 the radar cross-section of a typical fighter jet.
The Russian operators of the very drones the Yak-52 crew has been searching might attempt to ram the Ukrainian airplane. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. On many events in Russia’s 28-month wider struggle on Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian crews have downed enemy drones by working their very own drones into them.
But it’s one factor for 2 drones every weighing just some kilos to tangle in mid-air: both might destroy the opposite. But smash a 20-pound ZALA surveillance drone right into a 1.5-ton Yak-52 and the harm may not be catastrophic.
