In their epic battle against Russian aggression, the Ukrainians have reached back to the absolute beginning of aerial warfare to take down Russian Shahed drones: they are shooting them down with automatic rifles from open-cockpit airplanes.
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Shahed drones are an Iranian-designed UAV manufactured in both Iran and Russia. Shaheds (the word means “witness” in both Farsi and Arabic. No, I don’t what that’s supposed to represent either, though I suspect some kind of Twelver nonsense.) are manufactured in two basic models – propeller-driven and jet-propelled. They are cheap, easily manufactured, and can be simply thrown away in large numbers, which Russia has been doing in what amounts to terror attacks against the Ukrainian populace.
The Shahed-136 propeller-driven model cruises at a speed of 115 mph, which can easily be matched by light propeller aircraft. This the Ukrainians have been doing in recent months, taking down large numbers of drones while at the same time freeing advanced jets for more critical missions.
The Ukrainians evidently use a mix of light aircraft for the mission, among them the Yak-52 trainer, which could almost have been designed for the role, since it’s a two-seater with the pilot sitting in front and the gunner-observer in the rear seat. After spotting a Shahed, the gunner opens up on it with an automatic rifle (Likely an AK), hosing it down until it’s damaged enough to crash. These teams have been quite successful; at times they have reported downing up to a dozen or more Shaheds a day.
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All this harkens back to the opening years of WW I, when aerial operations were in their infancy and actual air combat was still a theory. Observer aircraft (we’d call them “reconnaissance”) from both sides would often encounter each other above the trenches. The observers first blasted away at each other with pistols, and in short order rifles and at last machine guns, which were fitted to the aircraft and became fixed armament. It was in early 1915 that dedicated pursuit (later “fighter”) aircraft appeared, with machine guns firing through the propeller. Originally, steel plates were fitted to the propeller to deflect the bullets (which must have been hair-raising). It was the Germans who developed the interrupter gear, a cam attached to the propeller that prevented the gun from firing when a propeller blade was in the way. Then the air war was on for real.
It’s unlikely that this new era in hand-held aerial gunnery will last much longer than the first one did. The Russians can simply replace the slow propeller drones with more expensive and complex but faster jet-propelled models, some of which are reported to achieve speeds of up to 500 mph. But it’s still a testimony to the imagination and daring of Ukrainian flight crews. It would be nice to think that their leaders will provide them with a country worth going back to when it’s all over.
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