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.
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.
“Mediocre” can be a relative term. I would call myself a “mediocre” runner, because I run a handful of times a week and can beat most people on a 3000m, but am eons away from the pros. A “mediocre” fpv pilot can be someone who flies regularly and who most people would look at and consider “really good”, but who is still far from being a pro.
