David Axe
Forbes
July 15, 2024
Russians are getting really fed up with the Ukrainian crew of that Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane that has been dogfighting with, and shooting down, Russian surveillance drones—World War I-style. In three months, two aviators riding in a Yak-52—a front-seat pilot and a back-seat gunner—have taken out at least 12 Russian drones, if you believe the kill markings the crew has painted on the side of the 1970s-vintage plane. “Isn’t it time to shoot him down?” one Russian blogger wrote.
The problem for the Russians is that a Yak-52 is hard to knock down for the same reason it’s an effective platform for a shotgun-armed crew member taking potshots at nearby drones. The Yakovlev is robust and inconspicuous.
A propeller-driven Yak-52 doesn’t paint a very big picture on the radar screens of Russia’s beleaguered long-range air defense batteries. And even if you damage a Yak-52 by, say, ramming it with a drone—the crew could probably still land the plane.
Earlier this month, another Russian blogger complained about the Yak-52 crew “firing at our UAVs like it’s a shooting gallery” over the city of Odesa in southern Ukraine. It wasn’t a new problem. Apparently searching for an efficient method of eliminating $100,000 Russian drones without firing a $4-million Patriot missile or some other pricey air defense munition, back in April the Ukrainians began taking to the air in that Yak-52, maneuvering to within shotgun range of intruding drones—and blasting them out of the air. It worked so well that, earlier this month, the Ukrainian intelligence directorate began training gunners to hunt Russian unmanned aerial vehicles from locally-made Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes. The Yakovlev crew’s successful hunts have inspired a whole new anti-drone tactic.
The Russians are losing patience 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 military can do about the Yak-52. Its patrol zone is at least 50 miles from the nearest Russian position. Yet the closest Russian air defense batteries are probably much farther away, as Ukrainian drone and missile raids continue to deplete their numbers and drive them farther from the front line.
In any event, a Yak-52 might be tough to detect. One 1976 study found that a Cessna 172—a propeller plane similar to a Yak-52 in size and shape—presents a radar cross-section of less than a square meter from certain angles. That’s a quarter the radar cross-section of a typical fighter jet.
The Russian operators of the very drones the Yak-52 crew has been hunting could try to ram the Ukrainian plane. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. On many occasions in Russia’s 28-month wider war on Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian crews have downed enemy drones by running their own drones into them.
But it’s one thing for two drones each weighing just a few pounds to tangle in mid-air: either could destroy the other. But smash a 20-pound ZALA surveillance drone into a 1.5-ton Yak-52 and the damage might not be catastrophic.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.