Russian Shahed-136 Kamikaze Drones now Armed with Air-to-Air Missiles
Russia has fielded a new version of the Shahed-136 kamikaze drone armed with a single R-60 air-to-air missile. In principle, the heat-seeking R-60 would give the one-way attacker a way to engage Ukrainian fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and creates a deterrent threat, but the effectiveness of this combination is unclear.
The Sternenko Community Foundation, a Ukrainian non-governmental organisation with a stated mission to help supply the country’s armed forces with unmanned aerial systems, shared a video online showing an air-to-air intercept of an R-60-armed Shahed-136.
The Russian one-way attack drone is said to have been taken down by a Sting anti-drone interceptor, which was developed in Ukraine by the Wild Hornets Charitable Fund, partly with funding from the Sternenko Community Foundation. The footage shows the R-60 loaded on a launch rail installed right on top of the drone’s nose.
[embed]https://vimeo.com/1142447986?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci[/embed]
Also known in the West as the AA-8 Aphid, the R-60 is a Soviet-era heat-seeking design, the baseline version of which began to enter operational service in the early 1970s. Variants remain in use in many countries globally, including both Russia and Ukraine.
At nearly seven feet long and just under 100 pounds in weight, the R-60 is a notably compact missile for its type. It is shorter and lighter than the R-73 that followed it in the Soviet Union, and also remains in widespread service around the world, and Western analogs like the AIM-9 Sidewinder family. As another point of comparison, the Shahed-136 is around 11 feet long.
Sources: The War Zone; UNITED24MEDIA
