Via social media
In April, video taken from the ground and the air showed an incredible encounter over southern Ukraine.
In a scene reminiscent of World War I, a Yakovlev Yak-52 propeller plane, believed to belong to a Ukrainian flying club, flew around a Russian Orlan reconnaissance drone while a gunner in the Yak-52’s rear seat appeared to fire his machine gun at the Orlan aircraft.
The drone descended using an automatically deployed emergency parachute, indicating it had sustained damage.
Two months later, it’s clear that April’s Yak-versus-drone dogfight wasn’t a one-off: On Saturday, another video surfaced online showing a Russian ZALA surveillance drone and a Ukrainian Yak-52 tangled in mid-air. This time the video was recorded by the drone.
The new video appears to confirm that a Yak’s backseat gunner is indeed firing on a Russian drone, after some observers had speculated that the 1970s-era, one-ton training aircraft was firing on the drone with underwing guns or rocket pods.
However, as Italian aviation expert David Cenciotti has pointed out, very few Yak-52s were modified to carry weapons under the wings. Moreover, the Yak is effective in performing what the Italians call the “low-speed aircraft intercept” mission, or what the U.S. Coast Guard calls the “rotorcraft intercept” mission.
These missions involve military or law enforcement aircraft, often helicopters, intercepting slow- or low-flying targets in no-fly zones or other controlled airspace, then flying alongside them to identify the slow-flying object and determine whether it poses a threat.
The U.S. Coast Guard regularly flies these types of missions over Washington, D.C., to prevent terror attacks from small planes loaded with explosives and to scare off civilian pilots who sometimes veer off course and head toward the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
The most important attribute for a slow interceptor is its low stall speed, Cenciotti explains, but it also helps that the interceptor has multiple crew members, who can try to communicate with the target pilot or, in the case of the Italian helicopter in the slow interceptor role, shoot down the aircraft if it proves to be a real threat.
If Ukraine were to deploy Yak-52s in the same way that Italy and the United States are deploying slow-motion interceptors, the Yaks could circle over vulnerable cities like Odessa, waiting for radar crews on the ground to guide them to possible Russian drones.
The Yaks fly in formation toward a slow-flying target. The crew identifies it as Russian. A gunner in the back seat takes aim. It’s a safe, cheap way to defend against the hundreds of Russian spy drones that fly over Ukraine every day.
This is arguably safer and less expensive than guiding supersonic Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jets that risk crashing while shooting at slower flying drones. In December 2022, the Ukrainian Air Force lost one of its prized MiG fighter jets, and its pilot, nearly lost his life, when the fighter crashed into wreckage while blowing up a Russian drone.
Moreover, MiG fighter crews are too busy firing radar-guided missiles at Russian air defense batteries and throwing precision glide bombs at Russian forces to worry about intercepting unarmed reconnaissance drones, which would be easy targets for less advanced aircraft.