"And That's Where The Russians Got Confused."
- 6.05.2025, 17:50
An aviation expert explained the maneuvers of the Russian Su-30 before it was shot down by the Ukrainian naval drone Magura.
Anatoliy Khrapchynsky, an aviation expert and former officer of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, shared his thoughts on how Russian pilots could avoid being hit by a surface drone, and the difficulties the Defense Forces face when intercepting aerial targets with maritime drones.
Since the Ukrainian Magura maritime drone is relatively small, in order to hit it, enemy aircraft must operate at low altitudes, says Anatoliy Khrapchynsky, an aviation expert, former officer of the Air Force of the AFU and now deputy director of a miltech company. His opinion is quoted by NV in an interview with "Anatomy of Liquidation."
According to the aviation expert, in order for a Su-30 fighter jet to effectively work off a surface drone, the enemy would have to use either missiles against it, which is resource disadvantageous, or fire from the onboard gun of the GSh-30-1, which seems more likely.
"However, even if the enemy took into account his previous mistakes with helicopters," Khrapchinsky argues, "and decided to bet on speed, it is still necessary to descend to a low altitude to capture and work out such a target as a surface drone.
At the same time, for the Ukrainian side, to effectively work on an enemy aerial object, it was enough for the missile's targeting to occur.
"Since the missile used by the Ukrainian side has an infrared homing head and flies mainly on the heat trace from the target," explains a former officer of the AFU, "in the case of shooting down the Su-30, we can say that the missile flew in pursuit of the aircraft with the subsequent close-range detonation and defeat."
The aviation expert emphasizes that the Su-30 fighter is a maneuverable aircraft that could have evaded the missile, but the crew did not do so. According to him, it happened because the Magura drone interception task was short distances and the Russian crew simply did not count on such a development.
After all, even if the onboard systems signaled to the pilots that a missile was coming at the plane, they were most likely confused because they could not understand where the danger was coming from, the expert believes.
"After all, the pilots expected that the missile could come from another plane or even from the Russian air defense system," the expert analyzes, "but there were no other aircrafts or air defense systems in that place. Therefore, the crew was confused, and the message about the missile could have been mistaken for a mistake".