Ukraine

@NotMyOldRedditName @LaFinlandia

It's the second time this has happened. The previous one was roughly a year ago.

There have been drone strikes on helicopters in flight before that destroyed them, but all of the ones I have heard of were exploiting being able to ambush a helicopter as it is coming in for landing. Like ambushing a bear as it is coming home for the night and is about to walk into its cave...

This is much more ballsy, this is a FPV drone pilot getting up in the flight path of a Russian helicopter and fucking with it toe to toe as it is traversing at low level and is much more impressive in my opinion. The Mi8 may look like a big clumsy helicopter, but they are incredibly agile machines, the fact that an FPV pilot was even able to get into position to do this, and then was able to stunt on Russia by pulling an aggressive manuever to "catch" the helicopter demonstrates a tactical mastery to flying in combat with an FPV drone that I don't think a lot of militaries pilots have a healthy respect for.

I think most militaries are far more focused on the threat of AI automated flying bombs, but this is a decisive demonstration of the power of a human being flying an FPV drone that can organically identify an unusual high value target and successfully interdict it when the rare opportunity arises without bungling it. I cannot imagine how unbelievably hard it would be to fight againts Ukraine's military in fullscale highly lethal warfare when Ukraine has so many pilots like this, any tiny mistake you make and there is somebody who is going to whip a drone at you in a manner that exploits every single inch of opportunity given to them by it.

This isn't going to be something helicopter pilots will be able to ignore in the future, the helicopter is going to have to become a flying AA platform against smaller UAVs like this, which in some respects is mainly a change in fundamental doctrine but it also involves having the right kind of high reserve ammunition weapons that can deal with this kind of persistent threat.

Ultimately though, as cool as the move looks the primary question is how were the Ukrainian drone pilots able to predict where the helicopter was going to fly low over or was this mostly a chance thing? If they set up that ambush, even if it was an ad hoc thing it really demonstrates how much more command of intitiative Ukraine has in battle than Russia does. The whole POINT of a helicopter is supposed to be moving very fast and very unpredictably.

Edit yeah those Russian helicopter pilots simply got outflown and outsmarted by Ukrainian FPV pilots

“We noticed that there is a certain pattern in the way enemy aircraft operate. For some time, we conducted surveillance, analyzed and roughly determined the point from which the aircraft operated and the approximate time. Then, at the time when enemy aircraft usually operated, I would fly out on patrol and wait for the aircraft. When there were no helicopters, I simply flew further along the logistics routes in search of enemy vehicles. And today I was lucky.”