What happened to Turkey’s Bayraktar drones in Ukraine?
If at the beginning of the conflict the Bayraktar TB2 armed drones were praised by the Ukrainian military, a year later they practically disappeared. The remaining drones are now being reduced to reconnaissance duties, according to a military expert heard by Business Insider
Ukraine's resistance against the Russian invasion relied on the effectiveness of the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drones.
The imperfect tense seems a must today. Since the first day of the Russian attack, Ukrainian troops have uploaded videos to social media taunting the invading army with stories of the lethal attacks of the Bayraktar TB2, which is equipped to carry four laser-guided bombs.
However, a year later, nearly all of the TB2 drones are believed to have been shot down by Russian forces and those that remain reduced to reconnaissance duties. “The general assessment of drones like TB2 is that they perform well without sophisticated aerial and electronic warfare defenses deployed against them,” Samuel Bendett, an analyst and expert on military unmanned and robotic systems at the Center for Naval Analyses, told Insider .
“Once the Russian military got organized, they were able to shoot down a lot of TB2s,” Bendett added.
All the details.
HOW MANY BAYRAKTAR TB2 DOES UKRAINE HAVE
Ukraine said last year it had received 50 TB2 drones since the start of the Russian invasion, but by the end of 2022 it had largely disappeared from the battlefield.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TURKISH DRONES
The Bayraktar TB2 is 6.5 meters long and has a wingspan of 12 meters. It can stay in the air for up to 24 hours and travels at a maximum speed of 220 kilometers per hour. As SkyNews explains “it is a guided drone with a ground control station with pilot and observer and harnesses the power of a 4-cylinder engine. It is approved to carry a 150kg load on 4 underwing pylons, which includes: MAM-L laser-guided mini-bombs, UMTAS long-range anti-tank missiles and 70mm Cirit rockets, all manufactured by Turkey's Rocketsan.
“More than 250 units of the TB2 have been built to date and have been in service since 2015 in Turkey where it reached the milestone of 400,000 flight hours, becoming the Turkish aircraft with the most flight hours in history” he highlighted last year Ares Defense .
"The Bayraktar does, on a small scale, the work that a 200 million fighter-bomber would do, only that it hides in the cellar in the event of a bombing, is transported in a van and does not need airports" underlined Corriere della Sera . “Turkey's first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) may not be as cutting-edge as America's MQ-9 Reaper or General Atomics' SkyGuardian drones. Yet its appeal lies in its brutally efficient cost-effectiveness on the battlefield,” according to Fortune .
In fact, it is estimated that each specimen costs between 1 million and 2 million dollars. According to Reuters Bayraktar is probably the best-selling drone in the world.
WHAT HAPPENED TODAY?
"As a relatively slow and low-altitude UAV, it can become a target for a number of well-organized air defense systems – we have seen this in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh," the Center for Naval Analyzes expert explained to Insider .
While during the first months of the war Russia was vulnerable to Ukrainian drone attacks, it soon adapted to improve its electronic warfare and has since managed to shoot down and jam many of the Ukrainian drones.
USED FOR INTELLIGENCE PURPOSES
Now, Ukraine mainly uses TB2s for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance purposes rather than for attack, Bendett explained to Insider . Ukrainian forces are using "the drones' advanced optics and sensors to guide other drones for strikes while staying out of reach of Russian EW and airborne systems," he added.
In fact, a recent assessment claims that Russia is at the forefront of drone warfare and estimated that its forces were downing around 10,000 Ukrainian drones each month, it said. According to a report released by the UK's Royal United Services Institute, electronic warfare is a "critical component" of Russia's tactics and contributes to Ukraine's massive drone losses.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/ucraina-che-fine-hanno-fatto-i-droni-turchi-bayraktar/ on Tue, 30 May 2023 05:40:09 +0000.