An-28 Becomes World’s First Drone-Launching Drone Hunter

Ukraine just did something no military has done before. On April 23, footage from Ukrainian pilot Tymur Fatkullin showed an Antonov An-28 turboprop firing P1-SUN interceptor drones from underwing pylons in combat, then watching them ram Russian Shaheds out of the sky, as Militarnyi reported.

It’s the first time in history a manned aircraft has been used as an airborne carrier for purpose-built interceptor drones. The Inside Unmanned Systems team confirmed the An-28 also launched American-made Merops AS-3 Surveyor interceptors during a training mission, suggesting Ukraine is integrating multiple counter-Shahed systems onto the same platform.

What’s Actually Flying Off the Wings

The An-28 in question carries at least three pylon mounting points under each wing, giving it room for up to six interceptor drones per sortie. Crews use an onboard optical system to visually acquire targets, then drop the interceptor into the air at altitude where it accelerates to engagement speed.

Older An-28 missions used a side-door-mounted M134 Minigun to engage Shaheds directly, with crews reportedly logging more than 70 kills using that method alone. The pylon system is additive, not replacement.

The P1-SUN is the headliner. Built by Ukrainian firm SkyFall on a 3D-printed modular airframe, the interceptor weighs little, costs roughly $1,000 per unit, and reaches speeds up to 280 mph in its current configuration.

SkyFall says newer variants are pushing toward 280 mph, with a stated ceiling near 16,400 feet and a 14-minute flight endurance carrying payload. It uses computer vision and thermal imaging for terminal homing, and the company claims more than 1,500 Shahed kills and 1,000 other drone kills in the four months since mass production scaled.

The American complement on the rack is the Merops AS-3 Surveyor, built by Perennial Autonomy, the company formerly known as Project Eagle and reportedly funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The AS-3 weighs in at roughly $15,000 per unit, hits speeds up to 174 mph, ranges from 3 to 12 miles, and carries a 4.4-pound fragmentation warhead.

It accepts target cues from radio frequency, radar, or thermal sensors. The US Army bought 13,000 of them within eight days of the latest Iran conflict kicking off and is currently using them in the Middle East alongside Patriot batteries.

Why the An-28 Is the Right Aircraft

The An-28 isn’t a glamorous platform. It’s a Soviet-era light twin-turboprop designed by Antonov in Kyiv for short-haul cargo and passenger work. It has a 72-foot wingspan, a 43-foot fuselage, a top speed around 220 mph, and a range between 745 and 1,180 miles depending on load.

What makes it useful for this mission isn’t speed. It’s the short-takeoff-and-landing capability, which lets it operate from improvised airstrips Ukraine is already using everywhere east of the Dnipro.

The tactical case for air-launched interceptors is straightforward. A Shahed cruises at roughly 110 mph at low altitude. A ground-launched interceptor team has to scramble from a fixed point, climb, accelerate, and chase.

An air-launched interceptor inherits the An-28’s airspeed and altitude on release, which collapses both the time-to-intercept and the closing geometry. The aircraft can also loiter on station for hours over likely Shahed corridors, providing a screen that ground teams can’t match without a far larger force structure.

There’s also a magazine-depth angle that matters for any military thinking about this concept. The An-28 carries a Minigun on the side door and up to six interceptors under the wings simultaneously. Crews can pick the right tool for each engagement. Use the gun for cheap fast-pass shots when ammunition makes economic sense.

Save the interceptors for harder targets like the jet-powered Geran-3 that’s now showing up in Russian raids. Wild Hornets, the Ukrainian maker of the Sting interceptor, separately confirmed its system has also been launched from an An-28 in combat, and claimed the world’s first interceptor launch from an unmanned surface vessel in a parallel announcement.

The Cost Math That’s Driving All of This

The numbers are why this matters far beyond Ukraine. Russia is producing approximately 3,000 Shaheds and Geran-2 variants per month at the Alabuga factory and has telegraphed plans to nearly triple that. Each Shahed costs Russia roughly $35,000 to $80,000 depending on configuration. A Patriot PAC-3 missile to shoot one down runs around $4 million per shot.

The interceptor drone math flips that calculation. A P1-SUN costs $1,000. A Merops costs $15,000 today and is projected to drop to $3,000 to $5,000 at scale. Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70 percent of Shaheds incoming over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot rounds for the ballistic threats they were actually designed to handle.

Hanna Hvozdiar, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, told the European Business Summit last week that Ukrainian interceptor drones have killed more than 3,000 Shaheds since the start of 2026 alone, and the average unit cost across Ukrainian-made interceptors is now around $3,000.

The US Army has noticed. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Congress last month that Merops procurement happened in eight days, a pace that previously would have taken years. Ukraine is now exporting interceptor expertise to Jordan to help defend US bases against Iranian Shahed strikes. The Pentagon spent roughly $4 billion on missile defense interceptors in the first week of the Iran war alone before pivoting to Ukrainian designs.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant. The An-28 air-launch milestone is going to be studied at every air force in the world that takes counter-drone seriously, because it solves the geometry problem that ground-based interceptor teams cannot. A defender on the ground is always reacting.

A defender at altitude with six interceptors ready to drop is positioning. That distinction is the difference between playing defense and playing position, and Ukraine just demonstrated that a 1980s Soviet-built turboprop with $6,000 in interceptors under each wing can do it for a fraction of what any missile-based approach costs.

The implications for American C-UAS thinking are uncomfortable. The Pentagon has spent years procuring Coyote and VAMPIRE and various directed-energy systems, and those systems work. But none of them solve the specific problem the An-28 just solved, which is providing persistent airborne interceptor coverage over a moving threat corridor without burning a fighter sortie or anchoring a ground unit.

A C-130 with the same modification would do this job three times as well as an An-28. So would a converted Beechcraft King Air. The technology is mature. The doctrine is the gap.

For the broader drone industry, the lesson is that we’re now watching the manned-aircraft community absorb tactics that were developed for and by attritable unmanned systems. That’s not a small thing.

The Australian SYPAQ and AIM Defence contracts I covered last week were operating on the assumption that counter-drone is a ground-based problem. Ukraine just demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be.

Photo credit: Aero.tim