Cheap first-person view drones now hunt bigger prey in Ukraine

MILAN – Low-cost drones with first-person view capabilities are increasingly able to attack larger platforms – such as attack helicopters – in Ukraine as their pace of development has accelerated and they can now fly faster and further.

On August 7, the Ukrainian military released footage showing one of its unknown FPV drone models successfully hitting the tail rotor of a Russian Mi-28 Havoc attack helicopter over the battlefield.

The hit was one of the first filmed attacks on a manned Russian helicopter in flight using a Ukrainian FPV platform. Although these drone variants are widely used on the battlefield, attempts to use them to bring down larger, more expensive aircraft have so far been unsuccessful, experts say.

“There have been numerous attempts by Ukrainian FPVs to track Russian helicopters, but all of these attacks have been near misses,” said Sam Bendett, a research analyst at the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses. “It is difficult to track an FPV drone toward a military helicopter flying at high speed.”

Although available records do not confirm the overall impact of the hit on the aircraft, Bendett said armed forces around the world must closely monitor the rapid development of these small drones and their potential uses.

“The skies over the (Ukrainian) battlefield are currently teeming with fast-flying FPVs chasing much larger prey, and assuming one can get to the helicopter’s most vulnerable spots – such as the tail propeller – great damage can be done,” he said.

Helicopters proved particularly vulnerable throughout the war in Ukraine, partly due to the proliferation of ground-based air defense systems that made manned flights over the battlefield extremely difficult.

On July 27, Ukrainian military intelligence HUR reported that Russian forces had lost up to 326 helicopters since the start of the invasion. Bendett points out that some of Moscow’s helicopters are larger and fly slower than the Mi-28, which could provide more opportunities for a successful FPV attack.

FPV drones were introduced relatively early in the war to perform various tasks. In late 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the country’s intention to produce one million of these platforms in 2024.

While the drones initially had a very limited range of an average of three to five kilometers, today this has increased to 15 to 20 kilometers, according to Bendett.

The future use of FPVs in combat, according to Bendett, will likely involve them “flying in swarms and groups to overwhelm the enemy’s defenses.”

Other military experts also believe that the emergence of this new threat, together with the already exposed vulnerabilities of helicopters, will require a reassessment of the use and role of rotary-wing aircraft.

“The future use of helicopters in combat can and should be reconsidered, especially given the increasing number of unmanned systems,” Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told Defense News. “It is quite likely that their role as a means of attack could change after the Russian-Ukrainian war, as this function may be used by combat drones or even unmanned helicopters.”