Shahed Drone Spends Over Two and a Half Hours in Polish Airspace

A Russian Shahed strike drone lingered in Polish airspace for nearly two and a half hours before ultimately crashing.

This was revealed through an analysis by Ukrainian monitoring groups.

During its flight, official reports confirm that Polish air surveillance systems failed to detect the drone at any stage of its journey.

Based on the monitoring data, experts were able to trace the approximate route of the drone, which, on the night of August 19-20th, flew across Ukraine’s Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil, and Lviv regions.

According to the probable flight path from the border to the crash site in the village of Osiny, the straight-line distance is about 200 km.

Considering that the average speed of Russian strike drones is 120–150 km/h, this distance could be covered in about an hour and a half of flight, assuming a straight-line trajectory.

Since air raid alerts are deactivated 20-30 minutes after the threat disappears, it is likely that around 1:00 AM Kyiv time, the Russian drone left Ukrainian airspace and spent another 2-2.5 hours over Polish territory before crashing at 3:22 a.m. Kyiv time, or 2:22 a.m. Warsaw time.

It should be noted that such drones are equipped with jamming-resistant navigation systems, and there are only two possible scenarios under which it could have entered Poland:

– It was intentionally directed there.

– An internal malfunction occurred.

Even if electronic warfare (EW) systems were used to disrupt its flight, once leaving the area of operation, the drone’s autopilot would redirect it back to its target.

Therefore, even if the drone had entered Polish airspace due to the effects of electronic warfare (EW), it would have automatically redirected itself to its target, with the onboard computer recalculating its route to the pre-programmed objective.

As a result, there remains a high probability that the drone’s operators had set a target within NATO territory.