Ukraine manufactures new long-range strike drone - Forbes

The Nynja light aircraft, which was used as a basis for creating a strike drone (photo: wikipedia.org)

Ukraine has converted another sports plane into a long-range strike drone. Fragments of one of them were found in Russia over 600 miles (965 km) from the Russian-Ukrainian border, according to Forbes.

Forbes featured a photo from Russian propagandist Kirill Fedorov showing a homemade drone that crashed in a Russian field. The glider is an adaptation of the Nynja drone, which can be purchased from the Kyiv-based company Aerosor or as a kit that the buyer assembles at home.

The drone can travel 400 miles at a cruising speed of around 100 miles per hour with a payload of several hundred kilograms.

Photo: Kirill Fedorov via Forbes (forbes.com)

The Nynja is similar in shape, size, and characteristics to another Ukrainian sports drone, an adaptation of the local Aeroprakt A-22 aircraft. One of them on April 2 crashed into the industrial campus of the Alabuga Special Economic Zone and damaged the plant where Shahed drones were being produced for the Russian army.

The Nynja drone has a tower attached to an electro-optical sensor, and a video camera that helps a remote operator, connected to the drone via satellite, to aim it at the target in the final seconds of flight.

Autonomous navigation during a potentially six-hour mission is likely done using GPS.

Also, a 220-pound FAB-100 bomb was attached to the Nynja on a hard point at the bottom of the fuselage. Placing the explosive payload under the bottom, rather than inside the cabin as in the A-22, may indicate that the drone could drop the bomb and then turn around and return to base. This allows it to be used multiple times.

Forbes suggests that the cost of the Nynja drone is only a few hundred thousand dollars – about the cost of additional sensors, communication devices, autopilot, and explosive payload. This is much cheaper than a multi-million-dollar cruise missile.

“How many Nynja drones Ukraine might have on hand is hard to say. The various firms that have owned the basic design have contracted with the Ukrainian builder to produce at least 1,600 copies since 1991. That’s a lot of airframes,” Forbes notes.

Forbes suggests that today Kyiv is buying every Nynja glider that local industry can produce to turn them into explosive drones.

Aerial attacks on oil refineries in Russia

On the night of April 27, a large-scale attack by strike drones was recorded in several regions of Russia.

The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that during the night, 66 drones were shot down in the Krasnodar Territory of Russia and the temporarily occupied Crimea.

It later became known that the drones belonged to the Security Service of Ukraine and had attacked the military airfield Kushchevsk, as well as the Ilsky and Slavyansk oil refineries.