An-28 Skydiving Plane Has 222 Drone Kills. The New York Times Just Filmed Inside It.

The New York Times went inside an Antonov An-28 turboprop in a video posted May 5, 2026, riding along with the Ukrainian civilian crew that has converted a 1980s skydiving plane into one of the country’s most cost-effective drone hunters. The unit fires an American-made M134 Minigun out the cabin door at incoming Russian Shahed drones. Cost per kill, according to the NYT: roughly $500 in 7.62mm ammunition. The Iranian-designed drones they are killing cost tens of thousands. The surface-to-air missiles their work helps preserve cost millions.

This is the same airframe DroneXL has already covered twice this spring. In late April it became the first manned aircraft in history to launch purpose-built interceptor drones from underwing pylons in combat. With 222 confirmed gun kills as of that date per pilot Tymur Fatkullin, a single plane is now a complete counter-Shahed laboratory wrapped around a fifty-year-old Soviet design.

A skydiving plane, a Minigun, and the $500 arithmetic

The aircraft is an Antonov An-28 (NATO designation Cash), a twin-turboprop short-range transport designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv and mass-produced at PZL Mielec in Poland between 1984 and 1992. Before the full-scale invasion, this particular airframe was hauling parachutists. Now it carries an M134 Minigun pintle-mounted in the side cabin door, with the high-wing configuration giving the gunner an unusually wide field of fire downward and outward.

The Minigun is a six-barrel Gatling-type weapon. In the NYT footage, the crew fires at roughly 3,000 rounds per minute, half its mechanical maximum. The $500 figure the NYT cites is for a typical engagement burst of 7.62mm ammunition. Compare that to a NASAMS round at over $1 million or a Patriot PAC-3 at more than $3 million per shot, and the math does not need a defense analyst to explain it. The Shahed-136 itself costs Iran somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to produce, and Russia is building its own Geran-2 variant at the Alabuga plant at a reported rate of around 3,000 a month.

Russia has launched more than 57,000 Shahed-type strikes against Ukraine since February 2022. Ukrainian air defenses stop most of them. Some still get through, and the An-28 unit exists because traditional surface-to-air systems cannot economically engage cheap propeller drones at scale.

A widower and an aerobatic world champion run the unit

The two crew members the NYT introduces are Valerey Slipkan, who has lived in a trailer on the airstrip for nine months waiting for missions, and Timur Fatkullin, an aerobatic world champion who once made a living performing competition stunts. Slipkan is the only crew member with combat experience. He moved to the airstrip after losing his son in the first days of the full-scale invasion and began transforming the An-28 for war.

Fatkullin is exempt from military service as a father of five. He sold his business and poured his prize winnings into the project. He is also the public face of multiple improvised Ukrainian aviation programs, having previously documented Mi-8 helicopter Minigun modifications and, more recently, the An-28 interceptor-launching role. The crew is volunteer. Their orders come from Ukraine’s air defense coordinators. Since mid-2025, Ukraine has formally allowed civilians who are exempt from military service to fight drones in this kind of role.

Fatkullin’s rule, on camera, is simple: shoot the drone down over unpopulated terrain. Some intercepts require accompanying a Shahed for five to seven minutes until it clears a populated area. That discipline is part of why the unit operates at night and far from cities, with vectoring from air defense controllers and night-vision goggles in the cockpit.

The same airframe is also a flying interceptor-drone carrier

The NYT video focuses on the gun. It does not mention the second role this same An-28 is now playing. On April 23, footage from Fatkullin showed the aircraft launching SkyFall P1-SUN interceptor drones from underwing pylons in combat, then watching them ram Russian Shaheds out of the sky. The Inside Unmanned Systems team confirmed the same plane has also launched American-made Merops AS-3 Surveyor interceptors during training. DroneXL covered the air-launch milestone in detail on April 29, calling it the first time in history a manned aircraft has been used as an airborne carrier for purpose-built interceptor drones.

The plane carries at least three pylon mounting points under each wing. A full sortie can put six interceptor drones in the air without anyone leaving the ground. Fatkullin called the P1-SUN a “cheap air-to-air missile.” The unit cost is roughly $1,000. The five Ukrainian-made interceptor models DroneXL profiled in March are now being launched from a turboprop, a tactic that puts the small drone closer to the threat at engagement altitude before release.

Run those two roles together and one airframe is doing what a separate ground-based gun unit and a separate ground-launched interceptor team would do, on the same sortie, vectored by the same controllers. That is a very different concept of operations from anything in NATO doctrine.

Light aircraft account for 10 to 12 percent of Ukraine’s drone kills

Light aircraft and helicopters are responsible for between 10 and 12 percent of all drones brought down by Ukrainian air defenses, per The War Zone’s reporting. The An-28 is not the first improvised platform in this category. DroneXL reported on the Yak-52 hunters back in April 2024, when Ukrainian crews in Soviet-era trainers were shooting down Russian Zala and Orlan recon drones with rifles fired from the back seat. The doctrine has matured fast. From a rifle in a two-seat trainer to a Minigun in a transport plane to an underwing rack of interceptor drones, all in roughly 24 months.

The Gulf is now buying what this crew helped develop

Iran’s March 2026 wave of Shahed-style attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan turned Ukraine’s anti-drone playbook into a global export item. Gulf states burned through more than 800 Patriot interceptors in three days, a higher rate than Ukraine has received in four years of Western aid. Ukraine has 201 military experts deployed across the region to advise on counter-Shahed operations, and Pentagon Merops procurement was reportedly compressed to eight days. NATO is absorbing the same lessons through Project OCTOPUS and bilateral agreements with the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.

DroneXL’s Take

I have been following this airframe specifically since DroneXL’s April 29 piece on the An-28 air-launching interceptor drones, and the broader light-aircraft drone-hunting story since the Yak-52 reporting in April 2024. What strikes me about the NYT profile is how late mainstream Western coverage is to a story that has been documented in defense-trade press for over a year. The TF1 piece in February 2026 had this crew at nearly 150 confirmed kills. The October 2025 Polish OSINT post had them at 70. Fatkullin’s late-April account put gun kills at 222 plus a separate tally for air-launched interceptor kills. The NYT showed up after the airframe had already become the most documented improvised counter-Shahed platform in the war.

The interesting question the NYT did not address and was not asked: how many An-28s does Ukraine actually have flying in this role? The War Zone flagged this directly in February, noting that the airworthy fleet size is unclear and that additional airframes could come from Polish or U.S. military stocks. PZL Mielec, the original manufacturer, is in NATO territory. The aircraft’s civilian U.S. designation is C-145A. A formal transfer would not be technically complicated. Whether one happens, and at what scale, is something to watch as Ukraine and its partners try to industrialize this concept rather than relying on whatever airframes happen to be on hand.

The other thing worth watching is whether the gun role and the interceptor-launch role on the same airframe converge into doctrine, or whether the Minigun gets quietly retired once interceptor stocks scale. The gun is cheaper per kill at $500 versus a $1,000 P1-SUN, but the interceptor lets you engage from outside visual range and against jet-powered Geran-3 variants the Minigun cannot reach. Both modes coexist for now because Ukraine is fighting a war and using everything that works. In peacetime procurement, somebody would have to choose. The Pentagon and the Gulf states will be the ones making that choice, with Ukrainian advisers in the room.

Sources: The New York Times (May 5, 2026), The War Zone (Feb. 5, 2026 and April 24, 2026), Militarnyi, prior DroneXL reporting.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.