Watch: Ukrainian gunner shoots down Russian Orlan drone from the back of a propeller plane

According to Forbes, the slow air combat tactics of World War I have returned to the battlefield. Back then, propeller planes did not have frontal machine guns. Therefore, pilots, and even more often co-pilots, targeted enemy planes with personal weapons.

The first air battles of the First World War were slow, almost comical. In the early years of the war, propeller-driven surveillance planes did not have forward-firing machine guns, so enemy planes were targeted with pistols or rifles.

After more than a century, shooting from the back seats of such planes began again. Last week, a gunner in a 1970s-style Yak-52 trainer belonging to the Ukrainian Volunteer Flying Club engaged in a battle with a Russian Orlan drone over southern Ukraine, shooting down the $100,000 drone.

“This is not the first time that the tactics and technologies of the First World War are being recreated at the front in Ukraine. Trench warfare is back. Also “turtle tanks” and “Maxim” machine guns. But the air battle “shooter vs. drone” may be the most dramatic example of modern warfare taking place under the brutal conditions of the conflict in Ukraine,” the publication said.

In other words, to shoot a drone from the back of the plane, the pilot has to get very close and the shooter has to aim carefully.

Scanpix/AP photo/Russian drone “Orlan”

There are fewer and fewer Russian Orlan reconnaissance drones on the front line. As radio engineering expert Sergey Beskrestnov explained to the Unian news agency, this advertised drone is outdated, so the Russians are increasingly using more modern models.

Read all news from Ukraine HERE.