Tymur Fatkullin Hunts Russian Shaheds In A Six-Ton Skydiving Plane, And The New Yorker Just Profiled Him

The New Yorker published a short documentary on its YouTube channel on May 26, 2026, profiling Ukrainian aerobatics champion Tymur Fatkullin as he flies nighttime intercepts against Russian Shahed drones in a six-ton Antonov An-28 that carried skydivers before the war. The video, paired with a written profile in the magazine’s June 1 issue, puts a cockpit and a human face on a tactic DroneXL has tracked since Ukrainian crews first started knocking drones out of the sky with light aircraft.

This is the same airframe DroneXL covered in late April, when footage showed it air-launching interceptor drones, and again in early May, when the New York Times rode along on a sortie. The New Yorker is now the second major U.S. outlet in a single month to treat a crew as a discovery after Ukrainian and defense-trade reporting documented it for more than a year. Fatkullin tells the camera the simplest version of the story: a man trained to fly upside down for sport is now using that training to shoot down machines aimed at his country’s cities.

From Upside-Down Aerobatics To Night Air Defense

Fatkullin won the opening Free Unknown at the 2019 World Intermediate Aerobatics Championship in Břeclav, Czech Republic, flying a red-and-silver Extra 330LX that he launched into its sequence inverted, a move that helped the Ukrainian team take gold and made his name on the international circuit. Trevor Dugan, a former Royal Air Force navigator on the bronze-winning British team, called the flying “absolutely phenomenal,” per The New Yorker.

Now 32 and a father of five, Fatkullin stopped competing after the pandemic and then the full-scale invasion. He tried to join the regular forces, hit bureaucratic limits, and instead co-founded a volunteer air defense unit with former military pilot Valery Slipkan. The crew skews older than a frontline rifle company. In the documentary, Fatkullin notes that many of his teammates were exempt from service because of the number of children they have, and that the unit’s commander is 65, turning 66. Their reason for flying, in his telling, is simpler than any recruiting pitch: they wanted to be useful.

The An-28 Is A Skydiving Plane Rebuilt As A Gunship

The Antonov An-28 is a 1980s-vintage twin-turboprop built for short, rough airstrips, and the one Fatkullin flies hauled skydivers before the war, a roughly six-ton aircraft now fitted with a six-barrel 7.62mm M134 Minigun mounted in the cabin door. The high-wing layout opens up a wide downward field of fire, and the short-takeoff-and-landing design lets the crew operate from improvised strips close to the front.

The crew flies on cues from air traffic controllers, who vector the plane toward corridors where Shaheds are inbound, then locates the drones with a thermal camera and night vision. The pilot says the An-28 can loiter for up to four and a half hours, and the crew has scrambled airborne in roughly ten minutes. The Minigun puts thousands of rounds a minute into a narrow slice of sky, enough to shred a small airframe in a short burst. The catch is range. As TechRadar reported, the gun only works if the aircraft flies inside visual range of the target.

The Crew Engages Only Over Open Ground

Once a drone is in sight, Fatkullin closes on a target that is hard to see and hard to hit, a black-painted Shahed of roughly 200 kilograms (440 pounds) against a black sky, brought down by a six-ton aircraft using the formation discipline he carried over from aerobatics. The An-28 is no racer, but a Shahed cruises slowly enough that the turboprop can fly alongside it and, at times, outpace it.

He cannot always pull the trigger. When a Shahed is over houses or power infrastructure, the crew holds fire, keeps the drone pinned in a searchlight, and shadows it until it crosses empty fields or forest. Only then do they engage. French network TF1, which flew with the crew in February, filmed the same rule in practice, according to Militarnyi: five drones downed in one night, with the gunner waiting out one Shahed until it had cleared a village. Fatkullin describes the work in the documentary as turning from hunting into dogfighting, fought in an analog, World War II style against an aircraft that does not fly itself home.

Russia Is Adapting, And The Crew Says The Advantage Is Temporary

Fatkullin frames the current edge as fragile, telling The New Yorker the crews “still have some honeymoon” before Russia closes the gap, a window already narrowing as Moscow hardens the Shahed against exactly this kind of interception. Iran ships the drones in white. Russian crews paint them black to disappear into the night sky.

Some Shaheds now carry air-to-air missiles, and the interceptor crews also fly within reach of shoulder-fired MANPADS. Fatkullin says none has scored a hit on his aircraft yet, but a slow, heavy plane has little margin if one ever does. Russia has layered on other countermeasures too, from rear-facing infrared spotlights meant to blind thermal seekers to very low-altitude flight profiles, changes DroneXL documented as Ukraine scaled up its interceptor programs.

The math still favors the defenders. The New York Times put the cost of a gun kill at about $500 in ammunition, against a Shahed that runs Russia tens of thousands of dollars to build, the same lopsided economics DroneXL has tracked with Ukraine’s $2,000 Sting interceptors. The tally has climbed fast. TF1’s February footage credited the crew with nearly 150 downed drones, up from about 70 in October 2025. By late April, Fatkullin’s own count of gun kills had reached 222, the figure DroneXL reported when the New York Times filmed aboard the same plane.

The crew has also stopped relying on the gun alone. In April, the same An-28 began air-launching interceptor drones from underwing pylons, the SkyFall P1-Sun and the American-made Merops AS-3 Surveyor, letting it kill from a distance instead of flying into the threat. Fatkullin has called the approach a cheap air-to-air missile, and it directly answers the gun’s biggest weakness, the need to get close.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the second time in a month I’ve watched a flagship American outlet treat this An-28 as a fresh find. We covered the Yak-52 crews shooting Russian recon drones over Odesa with rifles from the back seat in April 2024, reaching for the same World War II comparison the New Yorker uses now. From a rifle in a two-seat trainer to a Minigun in a transport plane to a rack of air-launched interceptors, the doctrine matured in about two years, most of it playing out in Ukrainian and defense-trade coverage long before the documentary crews arrived.

I’ve been following this specific airframe since our April 29 piece on the air-launched interceptors, and the broader light-aircraft drone-hunting thread since that Yak-52 reporting two years ago. The tactic is old news here. What the documentary adds is how vividly it shows the constraint Fatkullin keeps describing. He flies a six-ton target into gun range of a thing designed to detonate on contact, then holds fire and babysits it under a searchlight until it drifts off a village. That is the part a spec sheet never captures.

The interesting question is the one Fatkullin names and does not answer: how long the honeymoon lasts. The move to air-launched P1-Sun and Merops interceptors is the crew’s own hedge against the gun’s range problem, and it is part of the same counter-Shahed playbook the Pentagon and Gulf states are now buying. The harder variable sits with the threat. Russia has already been seen fitting air-to-air missiles to Shaheds and adding rear infrared spotlights to defeat thermal cameras. Whether those upgrades stay rare or become standard is what decides if a manned skydiving plane remains a viable interceptor or becomes a target. Fatkullin says no missile has hit his aircraft so far. How long “so far” holds is the number worth watching, not any dated forecast I could invent.

Sources: The New Yorker, The War Zone, TF1 via Militarnyi, TechRadar.

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