Ukrainian helicopter crews shoot down drones like World War II gunners

Surrounded by Russian surveillance drones and unwilling to fire multimillion-dollar surface-to-air missiles at targets that would cost only $100,000, Ukrainian forces are improvising cheaper means to shoot down the drones.

They have organized mobile fleets of trucks armed with machine guns. They have flown a Yakovlev Yak-52 trainer aircraft with a gunner armed with a shotgun in the back seat. They have even trained operators to Ukrainian Drones in Russian drones.

Now Ukrainian helicopter crews are shooting down Russian drones using machine guns installed in the nose of Mil Mi-8 Hip transport helicopters. It's an echo of World War II, when gunners in the nose of heavy bombers protected their planes from enemy fighters.

This week, a video appeared on the Internet showing a Mi-8 armed with a machine gun. In the video, a gunner trapped between the pilot and co-pilot fires a machine gun through the nose glass, blowing up a drone that is flying just below the helicopter. The cockpit fills with gunshot fumes.

Mi-8s have always been able to carry weapons under their stub wings or mount them on their open side doors. Only a few variants have been fitted with under-nose weapons. But it seems that any Mi-8 model with transparent nose glazing – as opposed to a fixed nose – can be fitted with a flexible mount for a gun that fires through the nose. A canvas flap replaces a single pane of glass.

The Ukrainian army has several types of Mi-8 with a glass nose in its fleet of around 75 Mi-8 and similar Mi-17. That is about 50 pre-war helicopters minus 25 war losses plus 50 spare Mi-8/17 helicopters that Ukraine received from its allies.

Pre-war photos show several Ukrainian Mi-8s with canvas flaps, indicating the helicopters' possible future role as drone hunters.

The Mi-8's cockpit is just big enough for three crew members to sit side by side: two pilots and a gunner. It's an awkward arrangement, made even more awkward by the exhaust fumes that fill the cockpit with every exchange of fire.

But that doesn't mean that a Mi-8 with an on-board gunner wouldn't be an effective drone killer. One of the very first downings of a modern unmanned aerial vehicle happened this way – in Bosnia in the early 1990s.

“An innovative Serbian anti-UAV tactic was the use of a Mi-8 Hip military helicopter, which was used alongside a [U.S. Army] “We need to launch the UAV Hunter and then have the gunner fire at the UAV with his 7.62-millimeter machine gun,” wrote JD R. Dixon, then a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, in a 2000 thesis.

Firing drones from a helicopter saves valuable anti-aircraft missiles. “Spending many thousands (if not millions) of dollars per missile to take out a cheap UAV is an economic loss,” wrote Paul Maxwell, deputy director of the Army Cyber ​​Institute at the United States Military Academy in New York.