In a sharp escalation of its drone campaign targeting strategic industries deep inside Russia, Ukraine seems to have fitted Cessna-style light planes with remote controls, packed them with explosives and flown at least one of them more than 600 miles to strike a Russian factory in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow.

Ironically, the Russian factory produces—you guessed it—drones.

Russians on the ground recorded the shocking scene as the light plane dove onto the sprawling Alabuga Special Economic Zone industrial campus, where workers assemble Iranian-designed Shahed drones that, just like Ukraine’s DIY Cessna-style drone, can range as far 600 miles with an explosive payload.

  • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Perhaps? I worry about this tactic being used in the US against targets. For all anyone knows, they’re a plane that just lost communication.

    • PhillyCodeHound@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      But in that case fighter jets here are usually scrambled and if they don’t see anyone in the cockpit, they shoot the damn thing down

            • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              If you’re peeing out the window, you’re still in plain view of the intercept fighters.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              The openable part of the window on a Cessna is tiny and high up. There’s no way anyone could contort like that plus it’s likely to come back at you.

              I can see opening the door, but you’d likely need a copilot: I don’t know if a simple autopilot could handle that configuration

                • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  Plus then they’d have the opportunity to pee bomb various parts of Russia! You’d get volunteers lining up, drinking tons of water before the flight

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        And thats when you put down your mask, give hand signals saying radios out, and then veer the plane into the fighter jet and shoot it up with the machine gun!

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Used by whom? An actual military will need more than a handful of light aircraft to topple the USA and domestic terrorists just use semi-automatic firearms because they’re quicker, cheaper, easier and lower risk.

      Rigging up a plane to be flown remotely is a non-trivial amount of specialised work and you still need to know how to fly a plane when you’re done.

      Crashing it into something without an explosive payload has been done and it killed 2 people, one of whom was the guy in the plane. They’ll never win the approval of their far-right Discord buddies with numbers like that.

      Filling it with explosives isn’t easy either since they don’t have a death cult that insists anyone should be able to buy them for any reason. Start buying up enough to take down a building and you’ll have feds knocking on your door in days (if you don’t accidentally blow yourself up first).

      There are far more dangerous things to worry about than an imaginary plane.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Do you really want to publicly ignore 9/11 as an incident in which “an airplane was flown into things”?

            Considering that most small Cessna’s have between 3-500 pounds of full fuel load, and more if you strip out all the stuff for pilots and passengers, and provided military grade high explosives, you’ve got enough to do the same kind of damage as the Oklahoma City bombing (which was a 5000 pound anfo bomb in the back of a rider truck.)

            • PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Do you really want to publicly ignore 9/11 as an incident in which “an airplane was flown into things”?

              Sure, let’s do it since I’m now genuinely curious what’s going on inside your head. Is your reading comprehension that dogshit or did you ignore all that context because you genuinely thought “airplane did 9/11” was going to get you crowned “smartest person in the room”? Maybe you’re lashing out because I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of domestic terrorists just carry out attacks with their legal firearms? Let’s find out together.

              The headline and article specifically mention that a light aircraft was used. Everybody in every comment until you arrived is talking about Cessna style aircrafts with a maximum takeoff weight around 7,700kg, not a passenger jet with a takeoff weight around 200,000kg.

              The person I replied to said they were “worried about this tactic being used in the US against targets”. It doesn’t look like you felt the urge you frothily exclaim “WHAT ABOUT 9/11???” at him, so I guess at that point you hadn’t yet decided we were talking about massive passenger jets.

              In my comment, I specifically mentioned that filling a Cessna with remote control gear and high explosives is a non-trivial task, making it an extremely unlikely plan for a terrorist and without those things, the damage may not be fatal to anyone but the pilot.

              Then you burst in with your pants already pissed. “What if they just casually load it up with 500 pounds of military explosives they ordered off Amazon? It could do as much damage as a bomb that was 10 times larger and used materials that are closely monitored!”

              But fuck, if we’re going for baseless hypotheticals that ignore both the “size of plane” and “no explosives” caveats, why stop there? What if a racist teenager fills an A380 with nuclear warheads and crashes it into New York? Think about how wrong I’d be then – since for some reason, that’s important to you.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      Who said they lost communication.

      The Ukrainians installed a whole remote piloting system, it does not seem too difficult to control the radio remotely too.

      • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        No, I’m saying that’s why you don’t just shoot down a plane. For all you know it’s a civilian, an oligarch who funds your evil deeds with a pilot’s license, or someone from a NATO country who lost communication capabilities in the aircraft. It could be risky to just shoot something down randomly.