He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare.
For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
The reports also mention the truck roof opening remotely, one could also use GPS coordinates to trigger this. But doing it manually from a distance, after checking the surveillance cameras that the coast is clear, is more reliable.
I guess they used smartphones and SIM cards with mobile data for the remote communication...
> For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...
Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.
>Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings?
I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.
Because whether or not they're justified in doing so, Ukraine has made it clear that they have no interest in targeting civilians. They've been incredibly surgical and precise in their attacks. Unbelievably so, honestly.
It's a military airfield, so no civilian 737 there. There seems to be a video from the drone, meaning some kind of connectivity was present with or without autopilot.
Reportedly it was just running over local mobile internet connectivity. The attack was over so quickly they would likely not even have time to shut it down.
It's strange - blocking GPS is typical around military sites. So, assume the drones were hard-coded to zero a location - they couldn't do it, as GPS would be blocked. They had to be piloted. Interesting.
In theory. In practice you would not allow a single camera drone to be the single point of failure of a mission with such lengthy and risky planning, and dire consequences.
I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”
…but if GPS is jammed, and there’s only one camera per fleet, how exactly are the other drones supposed to navigate towards the spotted targets unless they’re all equipped with cameras?
You are just continuing to spout nonsense. All of the drones have cameras. Using a single designated camera drone is a stupid idea, overly complex and completely unnecessary.
I think the problem is an assumption that people are too stupid to grasp their brilliant idea.
That being said, having all drones equipped with cameras could enable a more robust version of what they’re talking about:
If uplink with human operators is lost, but short-range comms between drones exist, they could use their video feeds to autonomously coordinate amongst themselves.
So now the camera is pointed at the target? How is it checking that the other drones are headed in the right direction? And the personnel on the ground? They're just chillin' waiting for those other drones to come intersect with the stationary spotter drone's line of sight?
We have two years of footage from Ukraine, where camera-equipped drones are launched from a several miles away at most, and where there are networks of pilots and support specialists to assemble and launch more drones in case of (frequent) failure.
I don’t think it’s wise to wager the success of a 6-month mission deep in enemy territory on a plan with a single point of failure, especially when the alternative is equipping each drone with < $100 cameras.
lmao what? You want to loiter with a camera drone to guide other drones to target? How would that work if neither drone knows where it is (drones had no GPS lock, it's a fact, not a speculation)?
there was this German talking head "Nico Lange" who made this claim first without providing evidence for it. He is an ex politician and a regular in the Munich Security Conference and I assume this is who was (mainly) responsible for spreading it.
AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.
"ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost."
Not for this task, but could be used autonomously. If they trusted that these planes were still in the same spot, and their GPS coordinates were accurate to 10 cm, then what they could do is just program the drones to fly a preset route at preset heights, stop over the plane's wing and then descend all the way to 0 meters.
Even with that level of target knowledge (I suspect the US has the investment in the sensor-targeting links to be able to use satellites to know within cm where planes were within a five minute window, but am not sure about other nations) you'd want to have some that were available for later re-targeting to handle misses. Nuclear weapons war plans solve this by relentlessly re-targeting again and again (declassified 1960's USAF war plans called for over 70 different missiles to hit Moscow alone) but with the smaller damage radius of conventional weapons you either end up with a second strike to make sure you get all the survivors of the first strike- or have a trained human who knows the targeting priority in the loop available to update targeting on the fly.
You can also see the careful departure of drones from containers in the videos, without extra panning or yaw. Not quite how a human operator would fly them.
Via the regular mobile network according to one article I read. The Ukrainians said that all operators where safely out of Russia when the news broke, so I doubt they where at the airfields several hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine.
To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth, lower-latency wired link, maybe a front company established in Russia for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections. Or maybe just a colocated server at a major backbone site in Russia was rented by a Russian front company. Seems like the kind of thing intelligence services do. While I'm sure Russia has more restrictions on renting colocated servers than the U.S., it's still something that needs to happen every day. Russia also has a fairly robust underground economy of less-than-legitimate companies doing illicit things, so there have to be ways for those companies to avoid restrictions (probably involving bribing certain people).
If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.
Yes, I assume it probably does except maybe during periods of elevated alert. A large military airbase capable of being home base to bombers is like a small city, with thousands of civilian workers.
Anyway, the drones used mobile internet between the launch point outside the base and the pilots in Ukraine. The connection between the launch point and the drones was point-to-point drone control frequencies which does not use the mobile phone network.
Yes, Ukrainian military leadership has admitted that Starlink has been so vital that they would have had no chance without it. Starlink latency can be faster than cable in some parts of the us. Remember light travels faster in air than through metal wire as radio.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo