Kratos’ ramp-launched Valkyrie drone.
U.A. Air Force photo
One of Ukraine’s newest strike drones—the UAC FP-1—travels as far as 1,000 miles with a warhead weighing up to 250 pounds, likely making it significantly more powerful than the roughly similar, but years older, UkrSpecSystems PD-1. The latter ranges maybe 600 miles, presumably with a lighter warhead.
Ukrainian-Czech UAC tweaked a lot of small things to extend the propeller-driven FP-1’s range and payload compared to older drones. The biggest refinement is the most obvious: the FP-1 doesn’t have landing gear. Instead of taking off on its own wheels like the PD-1 does, the FP-1 blasts off from an angled ramp, propelled by a fuselage-mounted rocket.
The new drone made its official public debut at a recent exhibition in Kyiv. But production actually began last year—and the type has already seen combat.
Ukraine boasts an array of domestically produced strike drones, and routinely strikes targets such as air bases and oil refineries hundreds of miles inside Russia. The deepest strikes are the most demanding, of course, and usually fall to the small number of Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes that the Ukrainians have converted into far-flying attack drones by replacing the human pilot with remote and autonomous control.
But the A-22s, each costing $80,000 or more before the addition of drone controls and warheads, are an awkward solution to Ukraine’s long-range strike problem. They’re designed to be manned planes and have voluminous cockpits. They are, in other words, overbuilt for what they do as drones. That might explain why an A-22 or similar sport-plane drone evidently ranges just 800 miles or so with a 220-pound warhead.
The FP-1, which might cost more than $100,000, should go farther with a similar payload. It helps that UAC omitted the landing gear, which on most manned planes accounts for up to 5% of the overall weight. If the gear folds up into the fuselage for maximum aerodynamic efficiency, it also consumes a lot of internal volume.
It’s not for no reason that, when U.S. firm Kratos developed a landing-gear version of its ramp-launched Valkyrie attack drone, it also cut the drone’s payload from four bombs (weighing 1,000 pounds in total) to just two bombs (together weighing 500 pounds).
There’s an even better way to launch a drone: mount it on a rolling trolley that the drone jettisons on takeoff. That way, it can build up a high takeoff speed on a runway—and omit the rear-mounted rocket—without also having to lug around heavy landing gear.
This only works for reusable drones if they also have internal parachutes they can deploy in order to float back down to their bases after a mission. The FP-1 is a one-way attack drone that slams into its target and explodes; it’s not expected to come home.