World War I Tactics Make A Comeback As A Ukrainian Gunner In The Back Of A Propeller Plane Shoots Down A Russian Drone

The first aerial dogfights during World War I were slow, almost comical affairs. In the early years of the war, propeller-driven observation planes lacked forward-firing machine guns. So the pilots—or, more often, the observers in the second seats—aimed their pistols or rifles at enemy planes.

More than a century later, aerial observers are still firing small arms from the back seats of propeller-driven planes. Last week, a gunner in a 1970s-vintage Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane belonging to a Ukrainian volunteer flying club engaged a Russian Orlan drone over southern Ukraine, reportedly shooting down the $100,000 drone.

It’s not the first time the combatants in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine have revived tactics and technology from World War I. Trench warfare is back. So are “turtle tanks” and Maxim machine guns. But the aerial gunner-versus-drone dogfight might be the most dramatic example of modern warfare devolving in the brutal conditions of the Ukraine conflict.

The apparent drone shoot-down was captured in videos shot from the ground as well as inside the two-seat Yak-52. In the videos, the 1.5-ton trainer—which cruises a little faster than 100 miles per hour—circles around the 33-pound Orlan. Gunfire can be heard. The seemingly damaged drone descends under its automatically-deployed parachute.

Slow-flying aircraft carrying gunners are an obvious choice for engaging slow-flying unmanned aerial vehicles without spending a lot of money.

One of the very first shoot-downs of a modern drone happened this way—in Bosnia in the early 1990s. “One innovative Serbian anti-UAV tactic was to launch a military Mi-8 Hip helicopter to fly alongside a [U.S. Army] Hunter UAV and then have the door gunner blast the UAV with his 7.62-millimeter machine gun,” JD R. Dixon, then a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, wrote in a 2000 thesis.

More recently, a French helicopter crew gunned down a Houthi drone over the Red Sea.

Machine-gunning drones from the back of a helicopter or plane saves valuable air-defense missiles. “Expending many thousands (if not millions) of dollars on each missile to eliminate an inexpensive UAV is an economically losing affair,” wrote Paul Maxwell, the deputy director of the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy in New York.

It’s especially important for the Ukrainians to save their best air-defense munitions as the wider war grinds into its third year. Ukraine still gets most of its missiles from its foreign allies, and the six-month interruption in supplies from the United States—the result of Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress slow-walking aid legislation—means missile stocks are desperately low right now.

But the cheap anti-drone tactic isn’t necessarily easy. Consider one of the first dogfights over the European front line in World War I. “We met a German aeroplane at about the same altitude as ourselves, and about the same speed, so that we couldn’t get any closer than 600 yards,” Royal Flying Corps observer Archibald James recalled.

“I put up my sights on the service rifle to 600 yards and fired six deliberate shots, and was miserable that I didn’t apparently hit him at all,” he said. “I’ve no doubt I was miles away. We had no conception then at what close ranges it was necessary to shoot to have any effect at all.”

In other words, sniping a drone from the back of a plane requires the pilot to get really close—and the shooter to take careful aim.