A Ukrainian Sport Plane Drone Just Flew 800 Miles Into Russia To Blow Up An Oil Refinery
It's the deepest Ukrainian drone strike of the war, so far.
The Ukrainian military has gotten so creative with what they’ve had available. I can’t wait to see what they do with all those F16s.
Slava Ukraini
Both planes cruise at around 100 miles per hour and blend in with civilian air traffic, making them difficult to intercept.
And the ruzzkis are not aware that there is some plane coming from Ukrainian airspace travelling 100s of kilometres around their forlorn country? They are that blind on the border to an active battle ground? And why would there be so much civilian air traffic near that battle ground that they can't oversee all air traffic?
Remembers me btw of German bumblehead Matthias Rust who flew a small single engine plane into ruzzia and landed in front of the Kremlin - in the middle of cold war. They simply didn't see him coming until he parked his plane right in front of their door.
Also it is a pretty long border with Ukraine and the Ukranians have been hard at work dismantling Russian radar and detection capabilities.
Static radar sites are long gone and the mobile radars are Prime targets for himars, storm shadow, scalp, Harm ER, atacms and homebrew drones.
The occupation of Crimea is very expensive in terms of radar losses, and I would not be surprised if the east of Russia has no more radar coverage at all.
And the there was the hunt for those radar planes, epic show of ingenuity.. twice.. so not lucky.
They did know, he was actually intercepted by a fighter jet at one point, who followed him for some distance, and was picked up on radar multiple times. They weren't sure if he was hostile or not though.
Russia was anticipating an attack using jets and ballistic missiles, they likely didn't consider a Cessna a threat.
To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the "ready aircraft" were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn't available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/911-takedown-never-happened-180955222/
Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.
“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.
They're saving missiles for passenger airlines and their own aircraft and quadcopters. Can't be bothered to shoot down every Cessna.
Maybe they’re flying these drones at very low altitudes to avoid conventional detection. I imagine it’d be through less densely populated areas as well for part of the way.
If they actually used a tactical nuke or attacked a Nato member and we retaliated by shooting hundreds of cruise- and ballistic missiles into Russia, I wonder how many they would actually be able to intercept. I'm starting to get the feeling that not many.
With their ordinance failure rate and low detection, russia should be happy with 1% intercepted.
The raids have somewhat throttled Russian gasoline production, but probably not enough to have an immediate impact on the economy—and thus on the long-term war effort. “These are spot strikes,” energy expert Hennadii Rіabtsev
I read that they had lost almost 20% of their refining capacity already, which sounds very significant to me.
There may be two factors there.
First, I think that the text is talking about those converted ultralight planes, not all long-range strikes. You had smaller drones; these were probably Ukrainian special forces operating behind enemy lines.
Second, I think I saw a similar quote, and IIRC, in the text I read, it wasn't "20% of capacity", but "strikes against refineries that comprise 20% of capacity". The strikes didn't necessarily shut a given refinery down fully.
Good point. It's a bit unlcear. This is from a month ago and I know it edged up since then:
"In terms of damage, the strikes have probably disrupted more than 10% of Russia's refinery capacity, maybe more than 15%. Depending on the extent of the damage, repairs could take considerable time," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Even if it's true, there's a huge capacity of oil refinery in Belarus which Ukraine doesn't want to target for obvious reasons
One of these days someone is going to use a drone they bought of amazon to commit an act of terrorism and people will wake up to just how dangerous these things can be.
I'm shocked a world leader hasn't been killed by a consumer drone yet.
I'd like to see a couple hit the skyscrapers in the Moscow financial district.
Lol got em
