FARNBOROUGH — Ukrainian company Skyfall has unveiled a new drone interceptor explicitly intended to strike Russian jet-powered Shaheds at faster speeds and hit them when they are at their most vulnerable, a company spokesperson said here at the Farnborough Airshow.
The P1-SUN Jetkiller was unveiled on Tuesday, and is the latest drone in the P1-SUN family. Designed in only three months to meet the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ requirement for a system focused on the Russian threat, the Jetkiller has already been combat-tested with dozens of confirmed hits on the front line, the company said.
“What we are seeing is that the Russians use regular Shaheds as a replacement for long-range artillery and jet-powered ones to hit inside Ukraine — that’s why we decided, and heard from our armed forces, that they needed something specifically geared to hitting these types of Shaheds,” Ares, the spokesman for Skyfall, told Breaking Defense. (Ares is a codename used by the spokesman for security reasons.)
Overnight Monday, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that the Russian military launched a drone attack against the war-torn country, employing 58 unmanned aerial systems of various types — including jet-powered Shaheds — of which the Ukrainians were able to destroy 46.
The Skyfall spokesman added that the key feature setting this latest interceptor variant apart is its speed, which can reach 370 kilometers per hour (230 miles per hour), a significant improvement over the previous 310 km/h maximum.
“What we see on the radars in Ukraine is actually that the top speed of Russian Shaheds can reach 400km/h, but they cannot sustain or go at this speed constantly — they dial the speed down during some parts of the flight, which is when we can catch up and hit them,” Ares said.
The P1-SUN Jetkiller is planned to enter mass production in August, and Skyfall is eyeing a production rate of 50,000 units per month.
Ares added that the new Jetkiller variant can be integrated on helicopters, among other platforms, and that this can offer tactical advantages for soldiers.
“If you launch the interceptor from the ground, it will take a lot of battery capacity to launch it and get it to begin its mission [intercept], versus directly from an aircraft, it is already in the air and also provides extended range,” he said.
A video published in February by Ukrainian pilot Timur Fatkullin showed, for the first time in publicly available footage, a civilian Antonov An-28 transport aircraft armed with interceptor drones used by the Ukrainian military to hunt Shahed drones.
Further, a video from the New York Times claimed that using this tactic and aircraft, Kyiv has been successful at destroying at least 213 enemy drones. One of the interceptor drones identified by the Ukrainian news website Militarnyi, which covers the armed forces, is an older interceptor variant from Skyfall, dubbed the P1-SUN interceptor.
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