No Effective Defense Possible Against Ukrainian Ultralights
In a picture I published yesterday about a drone attack on a Russian factory, you may have noticed that the incoming Ukrainian drone looked like a small airplane.
You would have been right!
An article by David Axe in Forbes spells it out: the drone was a made-over Ukrainian-built ultralight sport plane.
The Aeroprakt A-22 is a high-wing, single-propeller sport plane with room for two. Or for none, if you wish to substitute people with navigation gear and explosives.
The Aeroprakt A-22 is a Ukrainian success story, designed by Yuriy Yakovlyev. The company has 50 employees and an engineering team of 10. The financing originally came from donations, both local and abroad. He welcomes contributions; money can be transferred to PayPal - aviajournal.aon@gmail.com.
The company was featured in a “Top Ten Ukrainian Startups Making Global Waves” award. In passing, I am intrigued by one of its top ten peers, Firefly Aerospace. They now have 700 employees in Texas making rockets to support satellite launches. I wonder if they have any Russian-facing plans…?
A casual reader of his Facebook page will gather that he is rightly proud of the performance of his planes:
The company web page notes that the plane has a range of 529 nautical miles (979 km). That’s before any modifications for extra fuel and instrumentation adjustments.
Of course, I’m not telling anyone how to do their jobs, but surely an Intelligence Service such as the bloated FSB in Russia would have picked up on the fact that this aircraft can fly high and go as far as the newest factory you have built.
Of course (again) this is also the Intelligence Service that forecast an easy win in Ukraine with a victory parade within three days.
While Russia is using multi-million-dollar specialized drones to try to strike Ukraine, that country has resorted to using innovation on-hand to MacGyver an explosive result in Russia.
The A-22 drone flew 1,200 km from the Ukraine border in the deepest strike yet at Russian war preparations. The target, suitably, was a Russian drone factory making Iranian-designed Shahed drones.
The damage was estimated to be low, but this is sure to be only the first in a string of such strikes.
To put this in typical Russian perspective, the factory successfully intercepted a Ukrainian drone.
What makes it especially bad for Russia is that it is hard to defend against.
An arc of potential Ukrainian air strikes into Russia shows a shower of arrows outwards across a map of ever-expanding territory that Ukraine can hit. Moscow itself for example is closer to Ukraine that the Shahed factory was. Russian attacks on Ukraine, by contrast, congregate in a precise pool of potential targets.
Russia has to put an antiaircraft roof over its whole country, while Ukraine just has to hold up a shield.
And Russia’s anti-aircraft defences are notoriously poor. They have been of little benefit even in focussed areas, such as the docklands that are now marking the underwater memorials to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
And remember when that German teenager landed a Cessna in Red Square…? Mathias Rust had less than 50 hours flying experience when he breached the Soviet frontier; he was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘hooliganism’. William E. Odom, former director of the U.S. National Security Agency and author of The Collapse of the Soviet Military, says that Rust's flight irreparably damaged the reputation of the Soviet military and allowed Gorbachev to remove many members of the military command who were hostile to him. Gorbachev was responsible indirectly for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Out of such small things are empires dependent.
And perhaps the A-22 is another such ‘small thing’.
What makes it worse for Russia, is that the Ukrainian drones have such a large range that they don’t even have to be launched from Ukrainian territory. They could be launched from a sea drone anywhere near the coast in the Black Sea. This is my calculation only so don’t make a bet on it. But it greatly compounds Russia’s anti-aircraft problem.
The attack on the Shahed factory is a double blow for Russia. Not only is it undergoing an enormous effort to buy suicide drones and to manufacture them, but the finished drones are much more expensive than the Ukrainian counter-measure.
An Israeli source tells us that Russia is paying some $200,000 for a Shahed. This is known from a collection of documents that was leaked by a group of hackers called the Prana Network. The bottom of the documents bears the motto "We are anonymous. Expect us." This is a familiar slogan for the hacker group Anonymous, well-known activists.
Russia evidently paid 1.78 tons of gold ingots, worth $104.3 million, and another payment of two tons of gold the following day, for Iran to set up a Shahed production line in Russia.
According to the Israeli publication Haaretz - BTW, one of the best sources of news on the Middle East you can find - the production line was set up by the Alabuga Special Economic Zone because it is about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the Ukrainian border – beyond the 600 kilometer range of Ukraine's Storm Shadow missiles.
This is the kind of narrow planning you can expect with a government venture; the factory is jointly owned by the Russian government and the government of the Republic of Tatarstan, an autonomous region of Russia.
Then, of course, our Ukrainian innovators made a drone out of a plane that could fly more than 1,000 kms.
The entire factory is a wasted effort. And to have done this in wartime, when production cycles are limited, is a double crime.
And the final blow: the cost of the Ukrainian counter-measure.
The Ukrainian ultralight costs $90,000.
This is about the same as a single American-made Javelin anti-tank missile…and Ukrainian troops fire Javelins by the hundred.
Compare the numbers: Ukrainian drone $90,000; Shahed target $200,000; Russian factory $200-million.
Let’s assume that Ukraine needs to drop another 4 or 5 drones on the factory to make it inoperable – it’s still a bargain defence system.
Yes, the Russians can move it again, but that will take time and effort – both at a premium in wartime. And you can bet one or more planners will fall to their deaths from their hotel windows after this.
And when they get their new factory built, how long will it take for Ukraine’s MacGyver boffins to figure out how to reach it?
It also means that the Alabuga facility won’t be the last target for this new drone type.
The Alabuga raid reportedly injured 14 people and damaged either the drone factory or a nearby dormitory for workers.
The precision of the strike argues that the drone might have had human-assisted navigation in the last few minutes of the strike. It would otherwise use sensors for geographic awareness. A computer would analyze the inputs to decide on the best flight path.
One thing is certain: when Putin started this war he did not imagine for a second that he would have to be defending factories in Tatarstan from ultralight sports planes.
This whole venture seems to have gone a bit sideways for Putin.
Distance is no longer a defense.
He can only keep telling himself that everything’s OK, but has to follow that advice about “don’t look up”.
Because if he did, he might see an ultralight circling overhead…
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