Ukrainian officials are calling their F-16s “super effective” at downing Russian attack drones, reporting that these jets have already intercepted more than 4,700 drones, 1,100 of which occurred just this past month of October.
But what may be even more remarkable than that success rate is the skill displayed by Ukraine’s pilots, who reportedly relied on the jets’ M61 Vulcan 20mm cannon for the majority of these shoot-downs.
Engaging small, relatively slow-moving and highly explosive targets like one-way attack drones with the aircraft’s cannon is among the most complex and dangerous things a pilot might be asked to do.
American fighter pilots, renowned for the extent and quality of their training, have struggled to engage drones under similar conditions.
Facing shortages of air-to-air weapons that could make these intercepts significantly safer, Ukrainian pilots are going in for guns out if necessity, with no choice but to push their limits – and luck – to protect Ukrainian targets on the ground.
After years of effort, Ukraine unveiled its first operational F-16s in August 2024. Members of Ukraine’s fighter pilot corps had already spent a full year training to transition from their dated Soviet-era MiG-29s and Su-27s to a donated fleet of what will eventually be some 110 F-16AMs and BMs sourced from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium. Today, it’s believed Ukraine’s F-16 fleet already boasts 40 to 50 operational aircraft, though specifics remain a tightly held secret.
For American fighter pilots, progress from training onset to squadron assignment, generally takes two to three years if they move quickly. Ukraine’s pilots were walking in with experience derived entirely from extremely dated Soviet aircraft that are and were designed, built, and operated in very different ways.
French efforts to train Ukrainian F-16 pilots saw them compress their 18-month F-16 program into just six months, eliminating some training like air-to-air refueling and even long-range missile employment tactics in what ultimately became something of a combat crash course on the aircraft.
And despite offering a substantial leap in capability over the Cold War avionics found in Ukraine’s existing post-Soviet fighter fleets, these donated F-16s are no spring chickens.
Ukraine’s single-seat F-16AMs and two-seat F-16BMs are primarily Block 15 F-16As and Bs built between 30 and 40 years ago that received a slew of upgrades in the early 2000s as a part of the Mid Life Update, or MLU, program. That effort brought these jets up to a general technological level that might be compared to America’s F-16s during Operation Desert Storm back in 1991, rather than the most modern F-16Cs and Ds in American service today.
Thanks to that upgrade, Ukraine’s F-16s operate newer AN/APG-66(V)2 pulse Doppler fire control radar systems that, while substantially better than the fighter’s original array, are not nearly as capable as the more modern AN/APG-83 SABR Active Electronically Scanned Array radars found in modern American F-16s.
Before a fighter like a Ukrainian F-16 can shoot an attack drone like Russia’s Geran-2 down, it has to find it somewhere in the sky above more than 233,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. That can’t be done with the aircraft’s onboard sensors alone, so these pilots need to rely on a network of disparate but loosely interconnected air defense radar arrays and other surface-based or airborne sensors to vector them toward their targets. Once in the vicinity of an attack drone or cruise missile, the pilots turn to their onboard sensors to locate and close with the target – and that’s where things can get really tough.
The AN/APG-66(V)2 radar carried by Ukraine’s F-16s is publicly rated for a maximum look-up detection range of about 48 nautical miles, or 89 kms, and a look-down detection range of 36 nautical miles, or 67 kms, in the very best of circumstances against targets with much more prominent radar returns than you’ll ever get out of a small attack drone.
And that difference between look-up and look-down detection ranges particularly matters when it comes to engaging these drones, which tend to fly only a few hundred feet off the ground.
Radar arrays can spot targets above the horizon, against the backdrop of empty sky, much more easily than they can spot targets flying between the jet and the ground, where the surrounding ground clutter can obscure the return of the target. This makes finding these low-flying threats, which can be nearly invisible to the naked eye, incredibly challenging even with far more advanced radar arrays like the active electronically scanned AN/APG-82v1 carried by today’s American Strike Eagles.
“You’re talking about something that is on the very edge of a fighter aircraft’s ability to detect – what we call ‘find, fix, track, target and engage,'” explained Maj. Benjamin “Irish” Coffey, who was awarded a Silver Star for his heroic efforts to down similar attack drones over the Middle East in April 2024. “The best radar in the inventory is in this airplane behind us, and no one really knew whether or not its capability to find these [drones] even existed.”
In broad strokes, that means even the fire-control radar arrays in Ukraine’s F-16s likely struggle to find these attack drones until they’re very close by, and that problem is exacerbated by the limitations of the jets’ dated pulse Doppler arrays.
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Because of their low speeds, low-flying drones can fall through the cracks of radar detection, since they produce a very small Doppler shift compared to the surrounding ground clutter. While zooming through the sky at 600 miles per hour, a tiny target moving at roughly 100 miles per hour 10,000 feet below you doesn’t appear to be moving much at all.
Software makes this issue worse.
These arrays were being produced in the 1980s and 1990s and were meant to look for enemy fighters, attack aircraft, bombers, and sometimes high subsonic cruise missiles – all targets much faster than drones. So, the hardware may even be able to detect drone targets at times when the software dismisses them as trivial because they fall outside the target sets it was designed to look for.
None of this means you can’t detect these targets on radar, but what it does mean is that the angle of observation, approach speed, proximity, and the nature of the ground clutter can all make finding these targets in Ukraine’s skies exceedingly difficult. And these challenges are all made that much more difficult when operating in pitch darkness, as Ukrainian defenders often are.
And if the pilot finds the drone, then the scary part begins.
Today, Ukrainian F-16s are tasked with policing the skies against a wide variety of drone threats, but the Geran-2 is the most common Russian drone, so we’ll use that as our example.
Once an F-16 has spotted a drone like the Geran-2 from a few miles out, the best weapon to use to shoot it down (from an operational, rather than economic standpoint) would likely be one of the multiple AIM-9 Sidewinder variants Ukraine is known to have.
The most common Sidewinders in Ukrainian service appear to be older AIM-9Ls that date back to the late 1970s and slightly newer AIM-9Ms that went into production starting in 1982, though some Ukrainian F-16s have been spotted flying with advanced new AIM-9X Block II Sidewinders. These infrared-guided weapons hone in on the heat produced by the drones’ engines, and can be launched from two to five miles out, depending on the Sidewinder variant and conditions.
These weapons are extremely effective at downing airborne targets, but, they’re also very expensive compared to Russia’s drones – with a top-tier AIM-9X ringing in at just under half a million dollars, versus the cost of a Russian Gerran-2, which is now estimated to be as little as just $35,000.
And that cost-exchange ratio isn’t the only problem.
Starting in March 2026, sources inside Ukraine began reporting that their supply of Sidewinders had effectively dried up in the months prior. As a result, Ukrainian Viper pilots have increasingly turned to the aircraft’s 20mm onboard cannon to bring drone threats down.
The F-16s’ M61A1 Vulcan 6-barrel rotary cannon can fire up to 6,000 massive M56A3 high-explosive incendiary rounds per minute. With roughly 10.7 grams of H761 explosives housed within each projectile, every round hits like a miniature grenade. According to the Army’s Helicopter Gunnery manual, just one of these 20mm rounds has a casualty radius of approximately two meters, or about 6.6 feet.
The F-16 can carry a maximum of 511 rounds for its cannon, which at 6,000 rounds per minute (or about 100 rounds per second), gives each aircraft about 5.1 seconds of sustained fire before running dry. As such, pilots traditionally fire the weapon in short intervals of 50 to 100 rounds per burst.
This weapon has a publicly stated maximum effective range of 3,000 feet in theory, but in practice, it has to be employed at considerably closer distances when accuracy is a significant factor (like engaging a small airborne drone). According to the analysis of the Federation of American Scientists, F-16 pilots don’t usually attempt an engagement until they’re within less than 2,000 feet of a target. And therein lies the trap that is engaging explosive-laden drones with the jet’s cannon.
The F-16 may have a maximum speed of Mach 2.05 but it tends to cruise at closer to 580 to 600 miles per hour. If we take the lower of those figures, and convert it to seconds, we get a standard cruising speed of roughly 851 feet per second, versus the drone’s 100 miles per hour, or roughly 147 feet per second.
That means the F-16 will have just 2.84 seconds from the time the drone comes into range to the time the F-16 overtakes it, to make that shot. And you’d better take the shot earlier in that 2.84-second span than later, because the target isn’t just carrying up to 220 pounds of explosive fuel onboard, but also up to a reported 137-pound high-explosive blast fragmentation warhead (that’s more than six and a half times the explosives carried by a Sidewinder).
Ukrainian sources have estimated that shrapnel and debris from these warheads can reach a radius of up to 1,640 feet from the detonation. The visible fireball when you watch a drone explode is not the most dangerous part — it’s the practically invisible shrapnel that the fireball expels in all directions.
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In other words, the pilot has to wait until they’re within roughly 2,000 feet of a drone to open fire, and to minimize the chances of sucking any of that debris into the Viper’s big intake at cruising speed, that pilot would need to take the shot within roughly four tenths of a second after coming into range and then divert course to avoid flying through the shrapnel cloud.
Of course, the F-16 can fly much slower than its general cruising speed. According to the F-16 flight manual, pilots should not fly below 200 knots, or roughly 230 miles per hour, while carrying a combat loadout, and that can dramatically open up the engagement window for Ukrainian Viper pilots.
At a much slower 230 miles per hour, or roughly 337 feet per second, the pilot might have a total of roughly 10.5 seconds from the time it enters gun range to the target to when it would overtake it. But if we’re planning to avoid a debris cloud that may reach up to 1,640 feet from detonation, that still leaves just a 360-foot window in which the pilot can safely take the shot – meaning the pilot’s got just a hair over one second to take the shot and divert course before risking a shrapnel sandwich.
In reality, however, as we’ve seen in footage from inside Ukraine, that one-second safety window is not always feasible, and often, pilots push their luck by engaging these drones at even closer ranges and higher speeds. Not all drones carry the same size warhead, and flying through the shrapnel cloud of a detonation is no guarantee that your jet will go down, but in a very real way, going in for guns against these weaponized drones is a lot like playing Russian Roulette against actual Russians.
According to the figures Ukrainian officials released last week, their F-16s have taken down more than 4,700 attack drones since F-16 operations began in August 2024, and more than 1,100 of them in October 2026 – after Sidewinder shortages became a pressing issue for Ukraine’s Vipers.
Now, to be clear, these aircraft (and others) do have other weapon options to turn to. Ukraine’s F-16s have also been seen flying with America’s new AGR-20 FALCO, also known as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II. And although F-16s could feasibly carry up to 42 of these weapons per sortie (Ukrainian F-16s have never been photographed with more than 14), the number of targeting pods Ukraine has to equip its F-16s has not been disclosed, and the weapons themselves are shared among several other surface-based counter-drone systems.
These pilots are doing the seemingly impossible at such regular intervals that the seemingly impossible has become normalized in the skies over this fight.
Feature Image: A pair of Ukrainian F-16s, January 2026. (Air Force Command of Armed Forces of Ukraine)
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