Several Ukrainian companies have developed heavy-lift drones that can evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield, but the risks mean they should be used only as a last resort, an official involved in these efforts told Business Insider.
Denys Lohvynenko, the drone chief at Brave1, Ukraine’s state-backed innovation platform, said that heavy-lift drones provide a time-sensitive means of rescuing wounded troops in highly dangerous situations where they cannot walk on their own and other evacuation methods are unavailable.
Ukraine began developing heavy-lift drones two years ago, but the complex technical requirements took time to iron out.
On Monday, a Ukrainian military unit said that it had used a heavy drone to save a wounded soldier from the front lines, carrying out what it described as a “first-ever air evacuation.”
The presence of land mines and Russian drones rendered the use of ground robots — for Kyiv, an increasingly common method of casualty evacuation — too challenging.
“In these situations, heavy-lift aerial evacuation serves as a lifeline of last resort,” Lohvynenko explained in remarks shared by Brave1, which has supported the development of these drones and other war technology.
Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Assault Brigade said Monday that soldiers used a six-rotor hexacopter made by the Ukrainian company Gurzuf Defense to carry out the mission. Other defense companies are working on similar technology; SkyFall, for instance, recently unveiled its own hexacopter for evacuations.
Ukrainian forces also use heavy-lift drones for logistics missions, as they can typically carry more cargo than smaller variants.
A challenge is that big drones are big targets. Samuel Bendett, a drone warfare expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, a US research organization, told Business Insider on Monday that certain elite Russian military units are focused on downing such aircraft.
Lohvynenko said Ukraine understands the risk of using large drones in and around contested airspace, as is the case along most of the front lines. So they are “reserved only for high-risk, high-priority emergencies,” he said.
The heavy-lift drones have also been equipped with what he described as “additional survivability systems,” including electronic warfare and alternative communications. Active protection systems could be installed in the future.
“We maintain a realistic view of the technological and operational challenges associated with aerial extraction of personnel via heavy-lift drones,” Lohvynenko said.
“However, establishing this technical capability is essential,” he continued, arguing that a “single life saved on the battlefield justifies every engineering hour and resource invested in this program.”
Combat casualty evacuation has become increasingly robotic for Ukraine as the country’s officials, companies, and military units look to replace soldiers with machines in dangerous front-line missions wherever possible.
Ground robots, in particular, are seen as crucial tools for casualty evacuation and logistics. Ukraine’s defense ministry said last month that the number of these kinds of missions carried out by robots has jumped more than threefold since January.
The deployment of a heavy-lift drone for an evacuation, an unusual mission, underscores Ukraine’s growing efforts to use uncrewed systems in unconventional battlefield roles.
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