Ukrainian-made Sirko reconnaissance drones aim to replace Mavic quadrocopters at front
Drones are becoming an indispensable weapon in Ukraine’s fight to expel Russian invasion forces from its territory, with commercial, off-the-shelf quadcopters serving as eyes in the skies for Ukrainian front-line forces.
To end reliance on foreign-made drones, Ukraine
is ramping up its own drone
manufacturing base. Around 200
companies now make drones, but Ukraine needs just a few basic models to carry
out tasks like reconnaissance in the war zone, the chairman of the
Supervisory Board of the Skyassist Research and Production Company LLC, Ihor
Krynychko said in an interview
with Radio NV on Aug. 4.
"Every aircraft has its
purpose," Krynychko said.
"On the one hand, these
opportunity zones overlap with each other. However, speaking about Mavics or other quadcopters, they have their own
physics of flight. I mean these aircraft can hover in the air. This is what
primarily differs them from plane-type drones."
Skyassist is now setting up mass production of another
kind of drone, Sirko,
which is a fixed-wing UAV that has its own niche on the battlefield.
"We need to realize that
the full replacement isn't possible at all,” Krynychko told NV.
“The main purpose of quadcopters is to
watch a 300-meter-wide
area near the frontline,” he
said.
“They hover in the air and monitor the
situation. In aircraft-type drones (like Sirko) lift is generated by the flow
of the wing. So, it can sometimes replace a plane, sometimes a quadcopter. … A quadcopter is (like) a balloon from World
War I, when it took off
and a guy with a spyglass was watching the enemy from above.”
While unable to hover, Sirko is a
first-class reconnaissance drone,
which can also serve as a fire adjuster, Krynychko said. Moreover, its simple design means it’s
easy to mass produce – and Ukraine needs masses of drones, perhaps in the tens
of thousands.
"It's easy to mass produce,
besides it has a very interesting design which is plain and simple,” Krynychko said.
“It's a mechanism 92 centimeters in size. It's a monoplane.
There is no need to fold or unfold it to prepare it for combat actions or evacuation.
It's very easy to use. It is launched with a rubber band exclusively and works
mostly automatically. However, we left the option of manual control during
flight. An operator can order a drone to fly to the right, or to the left, or
in any other desired direction.
But mechanism automatically chooses the angle to turn at. It's called
stabilized flight.”
The distance between an operator
and a drone can reach up to 30 km, he added.
The new Kharkiv-made Sirko drone was first unveiled in May 2023.
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