UJ-26 Bober Received an FPV-Type Control System

The Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine has received modified UJ-26 Bober long-range drones with the ability to be manually controlled by the operator.

The DIU press service released footage of the new drone.

The attack drone developed by Ukrjet received a new modification with a thermal imaging camera on board, as well as an unidentified communication system that provided a high-quality data transmission channel with image broadcasting up to the moment of impact.

The characteristic image quality of attack drones has already been observed in previous operations of the Ghost unit, when Russian military bloggers reported the alleged use of airplane-type drones with a built-in Starlink satellite communication terminal.

It is noteworthy that despite the high quality of the image from the thermal imaging camera, the control of the drone itself is rather clumsy, which may indicate a high delay in signal transmission from the UAV to the operator’s control panel. This also indicates the realism of the version using satellite communications.

Given that the strike on the Saky airfield in Crimea required flying at a distance of less than half the combat radius of the drone, it could have been equipped with a more powerful warhead – the standard one weighs only 20 kilograms.

The video showed the launch of one of the drones from a catapult, rather than the traditional takeoff from the airfield strip. This requires the installation of a large launcher, but it eliminates the need for a landing gear, thereby improving the aerodynamics and range of the aircraft.

The disadvantage of this method may be the difficulty of launching large waves of drones – each drone requires a long time to mount on the launcher. Theoretically, this can be solved by waiting for groups of drones in the air, but this entails other limitations.

The appearance of the modernized UJ-26 Bober along with the Iranian Shahed-236 in service with the Russian army is another stage of the “drone war,” which, with the increase in the production of heavy long-range drones, is moving from the strategic to the tactical plane, as they are increasingly being used to strike individual combat units in the rear.

For example, the Russian Ministry of Defense recently showed footage of a Shahed drone being manually guided at an object in the frontline area near Kramatorsk for the first time.

The drone with a reinforced warhead was used instead of traditional means for the Russian army, such as adjusted Tornado-S shells or Iskander ballistic missiles.

Militarnyi previously published a detailed analysis of the wreckage of the new Russian Shahed-236 drone and compared its characteristics with data from secret documents on Russian and Iranian cooperation.