They are too slow to hit airborne fixed wing aircraft, and even if they were fast enough, they’d likely need onboard IR / Radar tracking and guidance systems to hit something moving fast.
At which point you would not have a drone any more, it would just be an AA missile.
Drones can hit parked aircraft though.
And there is at least now one usage of a Ukranian drone that sufficiently damaged a low flying, loitering, Russian Mi 28 such that it either crashed or was forced to do an emergency landing.
I’d imagine improvised/civilian drones are too slow to catch a plane, and that the kind of missile a “proper” military drone can fire would be cheaper, more effective, and more reliable than ramming something with the drone itself.
Modern aircraft fly too fast and too high for TV guidance to be practical for the most part (also the sky is big so target acquisition is more important in the first place), and if you were to make a really fast drone that had radar or infrared guidance, you just have a regular anti air missile. The reason drones work so well for ground forces is their ability to do recon and loiter over a target area until a target presents itself. A loitering anti-air munition could certainly be possible, and may already exist, but it would have limitations to its range, size, or manoeuvrability since a large amount of its weight would need to be fuel, which ends up leading to the conclusion that you might as well just use regular fighter aircraft, and in some cases putting air to air missiles on larger drones (e.g. Iran’s Karrar drone, which mainly carries bombs or anti ship missiles, can be adapted to launch anti air missiles as well).
With drone warfare continuously progressing, does anyone know a reason a one-way drone couldn’t be used as an anti-air missile potentially?
They are too slow to hit airborne fixed wing aircraft, and even if they were fast enough, they’d likely need onboard IR / Radar tracking and guidance systems to hit something moving fast.
At which point you would not have a drone any more, it would just be an AA missile.
Drones can hit parked aircraft though.
And there is at least now one usage of a Ukranian drone that sufficiently damaged a low flying, loitering, Russian Mi 28 such that it either crashed or was forced to do an emergency landing.
https://theaviationist.com/2024/08/08/fpv-drone-vs-mi-28/
I’d imagine improvised/civilian drones are too slow to catch a plane, and that the kind of missile a “proper” military drone can fire would be cheaper, more effective, and more reliable than ramming something with the drone itself.
Modern aircraft fly too fast and too high for TV guidance to be practical for the most part (also the sky is big so target acquisition is more important in the first place), and if you were to make a really fast drone that had radar or infrared guidance, you just have a regular anti air missile. The reason drones work so well for ground forces is their ability to do recon and loiter over a target area until a target presents itself. A loitering anti-air munition could certainly be possible, and may already exist, but it would have limitations to its range, size, or manoeuvrability since a large amount of its weight would need to be fuel, which ends up leading to the conclusion that you might as well just use regular fighter aircraft, and in some cases putting air to air missiles on larger drones (e.g. Iran’s Karrar drone, which mainly carries bombs or anti ship missiles, can be adapted to launch anti air missiles as well).