In a sharp escalation of its drone campaign targeting strategic industries deep inside Russia, Ukraine seems to have fitted Cessna-style light planes with remote controls, packed them with explosives and flown at least one of them more than 600 miles to strike a Russian factory in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow.
Ironically, the Russian factory produces—you guessed it—drones.
Russians on the ground recorded the shocking scene as the light plane dove onto the sprawling Alabuga Special Economic Zone industrial campus, where workers assemble Iranian-designed Shahed drones that, just like Ukraine’s DIY Cessna-style drone, can range as far 600 miles with an explosive payload.
Superior Ukrainian gen 5 stealth technology: The Cessna 206.
I’m just imagining a Cessna wearing a giant pair of Groucho Marx glasses.
You’re amazing and I love you.
Thats a decent ass edit
It’s a nose, actually. And eyebrows.
Now this is Marxism I can get behind.
:: wiggles cigar ::
Whether or not he’d let me stand back there is another story.
Next generation stealth plane: going back to basics.
They’re putting sails back on boats, why not?
Damn, thought this was Non Credible Defense.
Ukraine is basically the embodiment of NCD. I saw a guy carrying a traditionally vehicle mounted AA gun with a buttstock welded onto it.
Solid move. After you dislocate your shoulder a few times, you get used to it.
Evidently it was just a vehicle mounted machine gun, so no dislocation, but still noncredible as fuck.
I understand that the situation is not great and the stakes are very, very real.
At the same time it’s kind of amazing how this whole affair has this “improvised tube-sock & axle-grease sticky bomb” perseverance to it.
And that’s how it’s done, people!
This is great. Thank you for making my night
Let’s be honest…. Probably less expensive and just as effective as a tomohawk.
A Tomahawk goes about 4 times faster, but it seems it doesn’t matter if your enemy is incompetent.
Your comment made me go do the math and a TCM is, in fact, between 3.5 and 4 times faster than the fuel efficiency speed of a Cessna 206.
Kudos to you good Person.
And kudos to you for reporting that, so we all learn something new.
No, a Tomahawk is really only a little faster than a Cessna
/s
Surely the speed of the tomahawk depends on how hard you throw it?
African or European Cessna?
How many coconuts did it carry?
You mean an Indigenous Peoples Hatchet Missle?
Yes, although I believe they are incompatible with the First Nations Attack Helicopter.
It shouldn’t be, though. The Russian military should have shot it down long before it got to the target.
What a wild and spotted life that guy lives
I knew about him landing the plane. Didn’t know that he stabbed a girl almost to death because she wasn’t interested in him.
Just one of those things you do growing up
Anywhere can be a bathroom if you’re brave enough
Perhaps? I worry about this tactic being used in the US against targets. For all anyone knows, they’re a plane that just lost communication.
I mean, that kinda already happened
Yes, but not using much smaller, easily rented or more accessibly purchased planes.
The world isn’t very safe when you start getting creative.
The world isn’t very safe when you start getting creative.
Inspirational af.
Get this printed as a motivational poster and sell it.
But in that case fighter jets here are usually scrambled and if they don’t see anyone in the cockpit, they shoot the damn thing down
They had this eventuality covered !
Bad time for the pilot to be in the bathroom.
I don’t think most Cessnas have bathrooms.
They have windows…
If you’re peeing out the window, you’re still in plain view of the intercept fighters.
The openable part of the window on a Cessna is tiny and high up. There’s no way anyone could contort like that plus it’s likely to come back at you.
I can see opening the door, but you’d likely need a copilot: I don’t know if a simple autopilot could handle that configuration
And thats when you put down your mask, give hand signals saying radios out, and then veer the plane into the fighter jet and shoot it up with the machine gun!
This concept was in season 2 of Slow Horses.
I’ve never heard of this show. I might have to check it out!
It’s fantastic and so is Gary Oldman.
Used by whom? An actual military will need more than a handful of light aircraft to topple the USA and domestic terrorists just use semi-automatic firearms because they’re quicker, cheaper, easier and lower risk.
Rigging up a plane to be flown remotely is a non-trivial amount of specialised work and you still need to know how to fly a plane when you’re done.
Crashing it into something without an explosive payload has been done and it killed 2 people, one of whom was the guy in the plane. They’ll never win the approval of their far-right Discord buddies with numbers like that.
Filling it with explosives isn’t easy either since they don’t have a death cult that insists anyone should be able to buy them for any reason. Start buying up enough to take down a building and you’ll have feds knocking on your door in days (if you don’t accidentally blow yourself up first).
There are far more dangerous things to worry about than an imaginary plane.
Crashing planes into things has killed way more than 2 people.
9/11 comes to mind.
Do you really want me to publicly explain to you the difference between a small Cessna and a Boeing 737?
Do you really want to publicly ignore 9/11 as an incident in which “an airplane was flown into things”?
Considering that most small Cessna’s have between 3-500 pounds of full fuel load, and more if you strip out all the stuff for pilots and passengers, and provided military grade high explosives, you’ve got enough to do the same kind of damage as the Oklahoma City bombing (which was a 5000 pound anfo bomb in the back of a rider truck.)
Do you really want to publicly ignore 9/11 as an incident in which “an airplane was flown into things”?
Sure, let’s do it since I’m now genuinely curious what’s going on inside your head. Is your reading comprehension that dogshit or did you ignore all that context because you genuinely thought “airplane did 9/11” was going to get you crowned “smartest person in the room”? Maybe you’re lashing out because I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of domestic terrorists just carry out attacks with their legal firearms? Let’s find out together.
The headline and article specifically mention that a light aircraft was used. Everybody in every comment until you arrived is talking about Cessna style aircrafts with a maximum takeoff weight around 7,700kg, not a passenger jet with a takeoff weight around 200,000kg.
The person I replied to said they were “worried about this tactic being used in the US against targets”. It doesn’t look like you felt the urge you frothily exclaim “WHAT ABOUT 9/11???” at him, so I guess at that point you hadn’t yet decided we were talking about massive passenger jets.
In my comment, I specifically mentioned that filling a Cessna with remote control gear and high explosives is a non-trivial task, making it an extremely unlikely plan for a terrorist and without those things, the damage may not be fatal to anyone but the pilot.
Then you burst in with your pants already pissed. “What if they just casually load it up with 500 pounds of military explosives they ordered off Amazon? It could do as much damage as a bomb that was 10 times larger and used materials that are closely monitored!”
But fuck, if we’re going for baseless hypotheticals that ignore both the “size of plane” and “no explosives” caveats, why stop there? What if a racist teenager fills an A380 with nuclear warheads and crashes it into New York? Think about how wrong I’d be then – since for some reason, that’s important to you.
I’m pretty sure the tactic of flying civilian planes into things was used in the US against a few targets already…
Who said they lost communication.
The Ukrainians installed a whole remote piloting system, it does not seem too difficult to control the radio remotely too.
No, I’m saying that’s why you don’t just shoot down a plane. For all you know it’s a civilian, an oligarch who funds your evil deeds with a pilot’s license, or someone from a NATO country who lost communication capabilities in the aircraft. It could be risky to just shoot something down randomly.
Maybe that one reason they took a cessna less suspect so less chance to get shot down ?
Original plans called for a Boeing, but Ukraine knows better than the FAA.
The Boeing would drop its payloads with the wrong timing
Air traffic, at least in north America so I’m assuming it’s similar in Russia, is assigned air space that is permissible to fly in. Any aircraft entering even slightly restricted air space where it doesn’t have clearance will be met with communication attempts from a nearby radio controller, and in this case since the plane was unmanned I would guess it was probably unresponsive which should have raised some eyebrows.
Russian air traffic control is either inept or they don’t have the resources to spare a military escort for air space violations. It probably just became a whole lot more dangerous to be a hobby pilot.
Russian air traffic control is either inept or they don’t have the resources to spare a military escort for air space violations. It
Or both.
As another commenter said
A Tomahawk goes about 4 times faster, but it seems it doesn’t matter if your enemy is incompetent.
This is the equivalent of wrapping ping pong balls in tin foil, putting a lighter underneath for a few seconds, and suddenly effective smoke bombs.
Edit: Yes, you can try this at home. But outside and obviously don’t rip the fumes like a bong.
You forgot the part where the smoke bombs were able to travel a vast distance undetected after you threw them at a low speed.
I feel like that’s easy enough to fix with flint and some kindling/match heads.
This is pretty embarrassing for Russian air defense. Though, I also wonder if they were hesitant to shoot down an unidentified aircraft after multiple cases of friendly fire bringing down VKS aircraft. I’m also amazed that there was seemingly no Electronic Warfare (EW) systems in the area to prevent remote control of drones. Sure, there are EW countermeasures, but this seems like a pretty significant failure that this drone could be flown in from that far away.
Having a massive landmass has been a huge boon to Russia historically, but we’re seeing the inverse now with all these long range precision guided munitions. They have too much land to cover with adequate air defense, it seems
maybe it wasn’t remote controlled as much as pre-programmed?
Seems probable yes. Although it would still require GPS to keep its heading which can be jammed
Commercial aircraft have IMUs that carefully measure acceleration to get its position, IMUs are more accurate and reliable than GPS so GPS is the backup system.
“dead reckoning” is the technical term for precalculated navigation, adjusting the path only from sensors like IMUs
(unless they used stuff like cameras and POI based navigation, but that seems unlikely)
I don’t think it’s correct to say normal planes use IMU more than GPS, they’re all complementary. GPS tells the general direction and the IMU helps keeping the plane stable (no sudden jerks to turn when the GPS drifts). And ground radar tells the plane when it’s too far off the path.
“Dead reckoning” as in “dead reckoning” as in “deduced reckoning”. It’s the same kind of navigating people have done on boats for millennia. You start from a known point and move in a specific direction at a known speed for a specific amount of time. Then you change your speed and/or direction for another specific amount of time. And so on. If you have the ability to do so then you update your known position along the way via known landmarks you might pass.
Yeah but the errors creep up, so if you don’t see the islands of hope after sailing for 18 days at speed x, you’re fucked :-)
That’s why you have several systems, like gps to periodically try to get a good signal, or manual override.
An alternative is terrain mapping. You look at the terrain bellow you and compare in a database. Tomahawks navigate that way.
That navigation system was originally designed for the US nuclear powered doomsday cruise missile which would have zoomed across the USSR at supersonic speeds, low altitude, spewing radiation as it goes and dropping the occasional nuke. It could have done this for days.
Given what they’ve done elsewhere I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren’t big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it’s important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80’s computing power, and it’s only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.
I doubt an imu could have so little drift that it could hit a certain building though. I bet the gps just worked, I mean this was a place that people lived and used tech, not exactly an active warzone with gps jamming.
The IMU probably drifts by some small percentge but an intermittent GPS signal every few kilometers should ensure that it never gets too far off course.
But this thing a particular building at 600 miles. I doubt IMUs can be that good.
Right, totally forgot about that
They were busy jamming the European airspace
I heard they can stop nukes. I don’t believe it.
While embarrassing, the environment in which that happened was entirely different. You had Regan and Gorbachev actively working to improve relations. And no one was actively trying to blow up Soviet infrastructure. You’d think the Russian air defenses would be a bit more sensitive to small aircraft coming from Ukraine in this environment.
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The media tends to suck at reporting certain technical aspects of technology, including drones. Maybe this was a true “drone” in that it had a pre-programmed flight path and wasn’t dependent on real-time remote control at all. This can be achieved using off the shelf hardware and open source software at this point. Many military drones have this capability.
There were so many moments like that in this war. The grandma giving Russian soldiers sunflower seeds to put in their pockets so they grow when they die. The guy berating Russian soldiers saying “Every other woman here is a witch! All your dicks are going to fall off!” Zelensky saying “I don’t need a ride I need ammunition.”
Though I don’t know what else I’d expect from people who told the Ottoman Empire to go fuck itself.
Absolutely badass. Slava Ukraini!
please go meet bandera
In Soviet Russia plane is guided munition.
Hmmm… SU-27 replica on top of some “cheap” jet… Smoke from second engine… Control it like it was a damaged SU-27 returned home…
Land it wherever Russia has their temporary airfields… Boom.
After a while we’re going to see Russia shooting down their own jets 😁
Yeah pretty sure that’s a war crime under the Rome Statute. Emphasis mine.
The law applicable in international armed conflict forbids “mak[ing] improper use of … the military insignia and uniform of the enemy …” (Art. 23(f) of the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907; Art. 39 of Additional Protocol I; Art. 8(2)(b)(vii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court). Not all uses of enemy uniforms are prohibited therefore; only “improper” uses. For example, wearing enemy uniforms in order to flee the fighting or escape capture does not run afoul of the law (U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual § 5.23.1.4). On the other side of the spectrum, engaging in attacks while wearing the uniform of the enemy is flatly prohibited, as affirmed in the treaty law and numerous military manuals (see here, here and here, for example), and is a war crime under the Rome Statute.
It’s funny that there is an entire branch of law describing what is acceptable and what is unacceptable while mass murdering people.
New Geneva conventions list of war crimes:
- Wars
If the enemy is stupid enough you don’t even need a false flag, just some confusion
MythBusters: Ukrainian War.
That’s a crowdfunding opportunity if I’ve ever heard one.
I like this direct, in-your-face style they have going. Very refreshing and potentially fatal.
Where’s the video though?
Check out Denys Davydov’s telegram channel for example.
Now that everyone know this can be done, every country in the world needs to worry about terrorists replicating this. Maybe in the old days they need to go through security checkpoint at the airport to hijack large planes for 9/11, but now they only need a large plane and some time.
Absolutely hilarious that Russian AD couldn’t detect and shoot down a Cesna before it slowly plowed into a factory. Aren’t they supposed to have fighter jets or something?
