Russia May Have Blown Up Ukraine's Yak-52 Drone-Killer
Don't worry, there are plenty more Yak-52s and other light planes
It’s possible a Russian attack on Monday damaged or destroyed that Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane that the Ukrainians have been using to dogfight with, and shoot down, Russian surveillance drones over southern Ukraine.
Don’t worry. If the drone-killing Yak-52 is gone, there are plenty of potential replacements. There should be dozens of identical Yakovlevs in private hands in Ukraine.
A well-maintained 1970s-vintage Yak-52 sells for just $50,000. Soviet, later Russian, firm Yakovlev built thousands of the planes through the early 1990s. A Romanian firm still produces copies.
For three months starting in April, the Ukrainian crew of a camouflaged Yak-52 training plane hunted down Russian drones over Odesa Oblast. By mid-June the Ukrainians had painted a dozen kill markings on the side of the 1.5-ton, propeller-driven Yakovlev.
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle crews grew frustrated. “The Yak-52 flew over Odesa and with high efficiency shot down our reconnaissance UAVs for a week, causing laughter in some circles,” one blogger wrote. “This has not been funny to UAV operators and us for a long time.”
“Isn’t it time to shoot him down?” the blogger asked.
But shooting down a slow- and low-flying Yak-52—a plane with a quarter the radar signature of a typical fighter jet—is easier said than done. So the Russians targeted the plane on the ground, at its base: Hydroport airfield in Odesa.
Exploiting apparent gaps in local air-defenses, a Russian drone surveilled the airfield. The Yak-52 reportedly was in its hangar and a nearby surface-to-air missile battery never noticed the drone. An Iskander ballistic missile streaked in—and struck the airfield between a clutch of hangars and a row of parked attack drones.
The resulting blast and fires may have damaged several drones and the hangars. Whether the Yak-52 was in the blast zone and suffered any damage remains to be seen.
Even if the training plane burned to the ground, it shouldn’t be hard to replace. A list of civilian-registered aircraft in Ukraine from 2014 includes 33 Yak-52s, any one of which could replace the drone-killer. Remember: the Yak-52 itself never was armed. A gunner in the back seat shot at nearby drones with his shotgun.
It’s obvious the Ukrainian military intends to continue targeting Russian drones from light aircraft—and it’s obvious why: shooting down a $100,000 Russian drone with an air-defense missile might cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Shooting it down with a shotgun from a light plane might cost a few thousand dollars.
It’s not for no reason the intelligence directorate in Kyiv has been training gunners in locally-made Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes.
If the Ukrainians have lost their ace Yak-52 and want to replace it with another Yak-52, there should be options—and it won’t cost much. But they may also simply pivot to a sport plane that still is in production, such as the A-22.
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