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Armed forces faced problems using FPV drones
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.Commentary by Russian military blogger Andrey Chervonets is in italics: (Not certain of the provenance of the rest of the text) Here they promised "wolf packs of drones" that would even replace aviation, but so far the revolution has not happened. The person turned out to be weak and flawed - he is not able to make more than 2-3 sorties a day in viar glasses for a total of 40-50 minutes!  The danger of these cheap pieces of iron should not be underestimated, countermeasures and protection measures must be taken, but loitering military UAVs of the Lancet type, taking into account the deployment of electronic warfare against commercial drones, rule in the near future. Units of the 66th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Svatov region encountered unforeseen difficulties caused by the use of high-speed drones with first-person control. Some UAV operators of this type, who were captured during the assault on strongholds, complained of a sharp deterioration in health after the continuous use of devices for combat operations. How is an FPV drone different from a regular one? An ordinary commercial quadcopter is used for flights over short distances - about 5 km in range and 4 km in height. At the same time, its speed does not exceed 30-40 km / h. FPV drones fly much faster: they accelerate to 100 km/h in a couple of seconds and can reach speeds of 140 km/h. In this case, the drone is controlled through special glasses. It is at this stage that the problems of using such drones in combat conditions appear. What can and what can't an FPV drone operator do? Controlling such a device in a serious battle is almost impossible. The operator needs a safe hiding place and a stable communication channel. This is easy to achieve on the training ground, but not in a real battle. The flight range of most high-speed FPV drones does not exceed 2-2.5 km. This forces the operators to be positioned as close as possible to the line of combat, while at least two guards are required per UAV operator using goggles and focused on piloting. The closer the operators are to the front line, the higher the likelihood that they will be detected and destroyed by the enemy. At the moment, there is no technical solution for managing a group (swarm) of FPV drones: one operator is required per device. Thus, a swarm of 150 drones will require at least 150 operators. What problems are operators experiencing? The key difficulty in piloting an FPV drone is getting it right. At high flight speeds, the slightest deviation from the target due to too much pressure on the remote control, a gust of wind, or a sudden loss of communication between the device and the remote control - and the drone can crash, then you have to prepare another one. It is impossible to use a swarm of drones in an active attack against ten different targets to defeat them. Synchronous use is possible only with the most coordinated work of hundreds of operators or setting up a special program, but neither the first nor the second in the conditions of hostilities in Ukraine has yet to be found. Self-targeting combat elements (SPBE) are an alternative, but their use in FPV drones will lead to a significant increase in the cost of drones. How does flying FPV drones harm the health of operators? The organs of vision and the vestibular apparatus suffer the most from the use of FPV goggles. With daily use of more than 30 minutes, operators are forced to pilot drones exclusively while sitting, so as not to suffer from a fall. In some cases, the flickering image causes epileptic seizures, disorientation, less often spasms of the vessels of the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain, which puts the operator in a state close to concussion. Headache, nausea, disorientation and fainting in some cases occurred after 40-50 minutes of daily use. Captured Ukrainian soldiers in good health complain that after two flights with active maneuvering per day (when using FPV goggles), the operator as a combat unit is useless on the battlefield: his reaction slows down, his ability to solve complex problems decreases, his perception is dulled any, even vital, information. About 30-40 minutes of piloting an FPV drone in terms of psychophysiological state is equivalent to 5-7 hours of driving a car. Such consequences are not observed for operators of reconnaissance UAVs, whose flight speed is lower, and the image on the control panels is more static. Video is in Russian, but translatable: Tynts: https://t.me/rt_russian/152883 Posted by: badanov 2023-04-06 |
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