In the annals of warfare, necessity has always been the mother of invention—and sometimes the father of going completely old-school. That’s exactly what Ukrainian pilots, facing Russia’s relentless waves of cheap drones, have done. According to American Thinker, Ukrainian forces are now shooting down Russian Shahed drones the way aviators did in the early days of World War I: from open-cockpit airplanes, with automatic rifles.
Back to the dawn of aerial combat
The tactic feels like something out of a 1915 aviation magazine: a gunner in the rear seat of a light aircraft, hosing down an enemy drone with rifle fire until it spirals to the ground. The drone in question is the Shahed-136, an Iranian-designed, propeller-driven UAV also built in Russia. The Shahed—whose name means “witness” in Farsi and Arabic—is slow, cheap, and expendable. Russia has used them in what American Thinker describes as “terror attacks against the Ukrainian populace.”
The Shahed-136 cruises at about 115 mph, a speed that a light propeller airplane can easily match. That’s the key. By taking on these slow-moving drones with affordable propeller aircraft—rather than burning precious hours on advanced jets—Ukraine is both saving its high-end assets for more critical missions and taking out a large number of the drones. Reports indicate the Ukrainians have been at it for months, with some days seeing a dozen or more Shaheds downed by these ad-hoc aerial rifle teams.
The Yak-52: a plane that almost seems made for the job
Among the aircraft used is the Yak-52, a two-seater trainer that might have been designed for this exact role. The pilot sits in front; the gunner-observer in the rear. When a Shahed is spotted, the gunner opens up with an automatic rifle—likely an AK-pattern weapon—and keeps firing until the drone is damaged enough to crash.
It’s a far cry from modern air-to-air missiles, but it works. And it’s a striking echo of the earliest days of military aviation, when observers on both sides of World War I would fire pistols and rifles at each other from their fragile reconnaissance planes. Those improvised dogfights evolved quickly: pistols gave way to rifles, then machine guns. By 1915, dedicated pursuit planes with fixed, forward-firing machine guns appeared—first with steel deflector plates on the propellers, and then with the German-designed interrupter gear that synchronized the gun to fire between the spinning blades. That was the birth of true aerial combat. Now, more than a century later, Ukrainian crews are revisiting the rifle-toting roots of that era against a very modern threat.
How long can this last?
It’s probably not a permanent solution. The Russians can adapt, swapping their slow propeller drones for faster jet-propelled models, some reportedly capable of reaching up to 500 mph. That would put them well beyond the reach of a rifle-wielding gunner in a Yak-52. But for now, the tactic is working, and it stands as a testament to Ukrainian ingenuity and nerve.
As American Thinker notes, it’s “a testimony to the imagination and daring of Ukrainian flight crews.” Whether their leaders will give them a country worth returning to when this is over remains an open and painful question.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/taking-down-drones-the-old-fashioned-way/