The FPV drone as a weapon is a “child” of the Russia-Ukraine war. Around 18 months ago, the first videos of these drones, originally developed as sports and leisure fun devices, went online. Today, they can be used for attack and, more recently, for defense and shape our image of this war like no other weapon system.
The so-called “Bulava Shock Unit” of the presidential brigade “Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyi” has this week presented a video showing an attack with FPV drones on tanks and vehicles parked in a hall. is shown. The value of the drones used by the so-called “Wild Hornets” The value of the FPV drones produced by the so-called “Wild Hornets” is likely to be around 5,000 euros, the damage to the destroyed battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and trucks runs into the millions, and the hall burned down completely.
It remains unclear how far the location of the attack was from the Ukrainian positions and the front line. The battery symbols on the drone videos show only a few reserves, which would indicate an operation several kilometers into the hinterland. In any case, repeaters must have been used, as the drones still delivered quite good images even from the hangar, although they otherwise noticeably lose quality close to the ground.
The second interesting video published this week comes from the Birds of Magyar (see above). It shows a “drone air battle” with a subsequent collision between an unarmed Ukrainian FPV quadcopter drone and an armed Russian FPV wing drone.
It is no longer unusual for the image transmissions of enemy FPV drones to be intercepted and analyzed by the forces of electronic warfare. After all, the technology used is still largely civilian and both sides rely on analog transmissions, as a noisy analog image still provides more information than a digital image that no longer builds up at all due to too many transmission errors. In any case, the Ukrainians must have succeeded in either pinpointing the position of the Russian drone using its radio signal or they were able to identify the position of the drone and its direction of flight sufficiently well on the intercepted image. In any case, they launched an FPV quadcopter drone, which was then guided to the target by its pilot and ultimately destroyed. The Russian winged drone crashed as a result of the collision.
This “aerial victory” is also remarkable because FPV drones are not equipped with zoom and/or HD cameras; the transmission technology would not be able to transmit the enormous amounts of data produced at all or only with difficulty. In addition, the required transmission power would immediately attract the attention of the enemy’s electronic warfare system. As a result, the distances at which such small objects in particular can be detected are correspondingly short.
Nevertheless, in this case an FPV drone managed to intercept an approaching Russian FPV drone – and this is unlikely to have been a coincidence, as unarmed FPV drones are very unusual on the ground. Still, because the lack of payload leads to a correspondingly better flight performance and thus an advantage over approaching threats. We are therefore likely to see “interceptor FPV drones” in action more often in the future.
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