Ukrainian ‘Copter Crews Shoot Down Drones Like WWII Turret Gunners

Swarmed by Russian surveillance drones and disinclined to fire million-dollar surface-to-air missiles at targets that might cost just $100,000, the Ukrainian armed forces have been improvising cheaper means of shooting down the drones.

They’ve organized roving fleets of machine-gun-armed trucks. They’ve flown a Yakovlev Yak-52 training plane with a shotgun-wielding gunner in the back seat. They’ve even trained operators to ram Ukrainian drones into Russian drones.

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

A video depicting one gun-armed Mi-8 appeared online this week. In the video, a gunner wedged between the helicopter’s pilot and co-pilot fires a machine gun through the nose glazing, blowing up a drone flying just below the helicopter. The cockpit fills with gun fumes.

Mi-8s has always been capable of carrying guns under their stub wings or mounting them on their open side doors. Only a few variants have been armed with under-nose guns. But it seems any Mi-8 model with transparent nose glazing—as opposed to a solid nose—can be fitted with a flexible mount for a gun that fires through the nose. A canvas flap replaces a single panel of glazing.

The Ukrainian army has several types of Mi-8 with nose glazing in its fleet of around 75 Mi-8s and similar Mi-17s: that’s around 50 pre-war helicopters minus 25 wartime losses plus 50 replacement Mi-8/17s Ukraine has received from its allies.

Pre-war photos depict several Ukrainian Mi-8s with the canvas flaps, hinting at the helicopters’ possible future roles as drone-hunters.

The Mi-8’s cockpit is just big enough for three crew sitting side-by-side: two pilots and a gunner. It’s an awkward arrangement made more awkward by the fumes that fill the cockpit with each gun engagement.

But that doesn’t mean an Mi-8 with an onboard gunner isn’t an effective drone-killer. One of the very first shoot-downs of a modern unmanned aerial vehicle 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.

Machine-gunning drones from inside of a helicopter 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.