Now thirty-two, he has five children. He is tall, with a tight beard, pale-green eyes, and a square jaw. Even in casual situations, he stands ramrod straight, as though about to give or receive an order. He often wears a shirt with three buttons undone, a beige leather flying jacket with the collar turned up, combat pants, and Nike high-tops. He plays the guitar, a little piano. He often carries a thick fold of high-value bills. He speaks several languages, including English (almost perfectly) and Spanish (conversationally). He once spent thirty days in jail after breaking the ribs of a man who’d threatened his wife. (The case never reached trial.) He can dance the tango.
Fatkullin can do something else, too. He can fly an Antonov-28 within nine hundred feet of a deadly Russian Shahed drone, close enough to shoot it down. This is a rare and valuable talent in war in which Shaheds inflict severe damage and loss of life.
Caesar goes to Ukraine and meets with Fatkullin. He visits him at his base:
The airfield, once used by crop-sprayers, was itself in disrepair. The Antonov-28 was parked next to a metal shed that housed a workshop. To jury-rig a weathervane, an empty soda bottle with some hazard tape attached had been placed upside-down on a stick. By a grassy mound, steep steps led to a hidden bunker.
He meets Fatkullin’s crew: Valerii Slipkan, Serhii Gusak, Stanilav Lenko, Alex Marushko, among others. The group is known as Aerotim. Founded by Fatkullin and Slipkin, it’s a voluntary unit of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces
Caesar accompanies Fatkullin on a training flight:
The cycling of the turboprop engines was reminiscent of a busy laundromat; the vibrations stayed in your body long after the flight. As we reached an altitude of about six hundred feet, Marushko put on “first-person view” goggles, which allow a drone pilot to feel as if he were looking out of the cockpit of a traditional plane. He launched the interceptor drone, which shot out of its bracket and away from the plane. He wanted to see if he could land the P1-Sun at the airfield. This, he said, was a much harder skill than hitting a Shahed, since an interceptor must land vertically, like a rocket launch in reverse.
At one point in the training flight, Fatkullin asks Caesar if he wants to fly the Antonov:
Fatkullin called me forward and asked if I wanted to fly the plane. Sure, I said. (I don’t have a pilot’s license but I have flown before, under instruction.) The controls were heavy. To change direction, I had to yank the yoke with both hands, as if I were using reins to guide a stubborn horse. When Fatkullin is drone-hunting, he moves the yoke with his left hand only, because his right hand is controlling the spotlight that picks out the Shahed. He’d told me that the missions really “use your body,” and I now understood what he meant.
Caesar stays with the crew at a lodge close to the airfield:
Most of the job is waiting. While on duty, the crew must remain in a state known as “Readiness Two”: close to the airfield, prepared to answer a call to flight. During Readiness Two, Fatkullin, Gusak, and the other crew members spend much of their time in a two-story wooden lodge in a nearby forest, where the vibe is somewhere between a co-working space and a low-energy frat house. The men survive on pistachios and orange juice, with the occasional meal at a local restaurant. Once, I opened a refrigerator to find that its sole occupant was a can of Red Bull.
A call to flight comes in. The crew races to the airfield. Caesar goes with them:
At one-forty-five on a recent Wednesday morning, Fatkullin’s phone buzzed: Readiness One. We dressed and ran to a black S.U.V. parked outside the lodge, and were in the car four minutes after the call. At the dark airfield, many of the dogs were barking. Crew members wearing headlamps positioned L.E.D.s on the runway to guide takeoff; Gusak waddled onto the plane with his heavy minigun; Marushko affixed P1-Sun interceptor drones to their brackets. When everybody was on board, the back ramp was closed, and the Antonov taxied onto the runway. My heart was racing. Gusak idled on a bench seat.
But, on this particular call, the Shaheds don’t show up on the radar screen. The flight is aborted.
The most vivid and unforgettable part of Caesar’s piece is his account of a flight he takes with Fatkullin when the Shaheds do show up. Here are some excerpts:
We flew northeast. The crew members monitored a radar map of Ukraine on an iPad, which showed enemy targets in red and Ukrainian aircraft in blue. After about half an hour in the air, the target we were following disappeared from the screen: it had either crashed or been taken out by other air defenses. Four more Shaheds soon appeared, however, all travelling from the direction of the eastern city of Sumy, which is on the front line of the war. Shortly after 11 p.m., Fatkullin spoke over the radio (in English, for my benefit): “Targets are inbound, about fifty kilometres away. We are on opposite courses.” Behind me, Gusak laid his minigun on a mat and opened the door through which he’d fire the weapon. The cabin filled with cold air.
One of the crew members watched a screen, positioned between the minigun and the cockpit, that showed video from the thermal-imaging camera. He soon located a good target. On the thermal footage, the Shahed’s engine blazed like a comet; the rest of the drone looked like a grayish-white paper dart. A laser in the Antonov’s camera measured the distance to the Shahed. We were sixty-five hundred feet away—too far, on a moonless night, to see it without assistance. Fatkullin brought the plane closer, and then began a kind of courtly dance: we swept around from behind the drone until it was at our eleven o’clock, and then our ten o’clock. Gusak could not fire until it was between eight and nine o’clock. The distance to the drone decreased to twelve hundred feet. I glimpsed it out of the left window. There was something melodramatic about the image: picked out by the spotlight, the black drone, above forests and fields, looked like an opera soloist. Gusak peered over the top of the minigun, attempting to fix the target in his night-vision goggles. The distance to the Shahed dropped to less than a thousand feet. We were now in range.
Gusak positioned the Shahed in his sights. In the left-hand pilot’s seat, Fatkullin had loosened his seat belt so that he could fly while turning his body to look out of his window at the target with his night-vision goggles. Slipkan instructed Gusak, on a radio, to hold fire. The Antonov was flying over a highway, and they didn’t want the Shahed to crash onto the road.
Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag.
That is an amazing piece of writing! It’s made possible not only by the courage of Fatkullin and his crew, but also by the courage of Caesar, who is right there with them.
“The Stunt Pilot” is the best New Yorker piece of the year (so far). Hail, Caesar!
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