Ukraine's 'High Speed' Pilotless Bombers Are Lobbing 550-Pound Bombs

After six months, the unmanned, reusable sport planes are striking more widely

Russian troops in occupied southern Ukraine have come under attack by what was, to them, something new—a Ukrainian drone that drops a bomb during “high-speed” and “precise” strikes, according to one popular Telegram channel.

In fact, it seems the drone may be a known quantity: an Aeroprakt A-22, a modified sport plane that can range as far as 1,200 miles as fast as 137 miles per hour to drop a 550-pound bomb. One Russian soldier recorded, through his thermal scope, one of the drones dropping its bomb in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast recently. (See video above.)

The Ukrainian military’s Unmanned Systems Forces branch first deployed pilotless A-22s more than a year ago. The initial A-22 drones were one-way models that carried explosives in their cabins and slammed into their targets. The USF has aimed them at factories and headquarters deep inside Russia.

A propeller-driven A-22 costs nearly $100,000 before the addition of autonomous navigation, and Kyiv-based Aeroprakt can build the planes only so fast. So there’s obvious value in making the A-22s and similar drones reusable.

On Jan. 30, a sport plane drone reportedly operated by the USF’s 14th Unmanned Aerial Systems Regiment reportedly dropped a bomb on a pumping station on the Druzhba pipeline along the Russian-Belarusian border in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast.

The resulting blaze burned hot enough to register on NASA’s fire-detecting satellites. “Judging by the fire, the strike was precise,” Estonian analyst WarTranslated noted.

A day later, the USF confirmed it had tweaked the A-22 drone or a similar unmanned sport plane to drop a bomb and then return to base. “This is a unique development that changes the rules of the game on the battlefield,” the USF stated.

There and back with a bomb

In making one its longest-range drones reusable, the drone branch multiplied the number and pace of deep strikes it could conduct against targets inside Russia, which have also included bomber bases and, until a spring moratorium, oil facilities.

The strikes raised the cost of Russian bomber sorties targeting Ukrainian cities, and temporarily depressed oil production in a country that utterly relies on energy exports for state revenue.

In the 41 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Kyiv’s engineers have developed a startling array of increasingly far-flying drones.

Guiding a drone—usually through a combination of GPS, terrain matching, inertial navigation and direct human control via satellite—is fairly straightforward. Landing a it is hard, however. Smaller models can cut their engines, pop a parachute and float down to the ground. Bigger models must be eased onto a runway.

The world’s leading drone militaries have developed sophisticated automatic landing systems. It’s not clear the Ukrainians are investing the time and money to install these boutique systems in their own relatively inexpensive strike drones, which might cost just a few hundred thousand dollars apiece.

The alternative, long ago mastered by the U.S. Air Force’s Predator and Reaper drone crews, is for a human pilot to take control of an incoming drone in the last few minutes before it reaches its base—and, peering through the drone’s forward-facing camera, steer the machine to a landing. Just like playing a flight simulator.

Which method Ukraine’s reusable bomber drones use is unclear. But it’s apparent it works. The bomber drones are appearing more frequently in more places. On Feb. 27, one of the drones bombed a Russian position in Bryansk. A hapless Russian gunner tried and failed to shoot it down. (See image above.)

Now the pilotless bombers are in the south, too.

Ukraine’s manned fighters and bombers—Mikoyan MiG-29s, Sukhoi Su-24s, Su-25s and Su-27s, Lockheed Martin F-16s and Dassault Mirage 2000s—are its best types for interdiction raids. They can lob precision-guided glide bombs from tens of miles away and then jet away at high speed.

But the Ukrainian air force has just 125 or so manned fighters and must take care not to lose too many, too fast. It has managed to replace the roughly 100 fighters it has written off in the last 41 months by restoring old Soviet-vintage airframes and inducting the first of around 100 ex-European F-16s and Mirage 2000s.

Stocks of old Soviet planes are finite, however—and four F-16s have already crashed or been shot down. Ukraine’s European allies don’t have many more F-16s and Mirage 2000s to give away. The only other feasible source of surplus manned fighters, the United States, is an unreliable ally at best.

Ukraine’s long-range bomber drones are obviously complementing its manned fighters for some of the deepest, most damaging and most dangerous air raids.

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