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.
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.
No, a Tomahawk is really only a little faster than a Cessna
/s
It shouldn’t be, though. The Russian military should have shot it down long before it got to the target.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
