Echoes of World War II: Ukraine resorted to an unusual method of shooting down Russian drones, - Forbes
Date: 2024-08-23 Author: Кирило Загоруйко Categories: WAR
Russian troops actively use drones, in particular reconnaissance ones. In order not to shoot them down with expensive surface-to-air missiles at 100 thousand dollars apiece, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are forced to improvise.
In search of cheaper ways to counter Russian drones, the Ukrainian military organized mobile flotillas of trucks armed with machine guns, writes Forbes. In addition, a Yak-52 training aircraft with a shotgun in the back seat is used for these purposes. Moreover, the military even taught drone operators to ram Russian drones with Ukrainian ones.
"Ukrainian crews are now shooting down Russian drones with machine guns mounted in the nose of Mi-8 transport helicopters. This is an echo of World War II, when machine gunners in the nose of heavy bombers defended their aircraft from enemy fighters. This week, a video appeared online showing one Mi-8 armed with a cannon. In the video, the gunner, sandwiched between the pilot and co-pilot of the helicopter, fires a machine gun through the nose, blowing up a drone flying directly under the helicopter," the article says.
The Mi-8 helicopter has always had the ability to carry cannons under the wing consoles. They can also be installed on open side doors. Only a few variants were armed with cannons "under the nose." But, probably, any model with transparent glazing can be equipped with such weapons.
"The Ukrainian army has several types of Mi-8 with a glazed nose in its fleet, which numbers about 75 Mi-8s and similar Mi-17s: that's about 50 pre-war helicopters, minus 25 wartime losses, plus 50 new Mi-8/17s that Ukraine received from its allies. In pre-war photographs, several Ukrainian Mi-8s are shown with canvas flaps, hinting at a possible future role for the helicopters as drone hunters," the author of the article notes.
The Mi-8's cockpit is large enough for three crew members to sit side by side: two pilots and a gunner. It's an awkward arrangement, made even worse by the smoke that fills the cabin with every cannon shot. But that doesn't mean an Mi-8 with a machine gunner on board isn't an effective "drone killer." One of the very first cases of a modern drone being shot down happened exactly like this – it was in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
