- Ukrainian defense company Athlon Avia has been producing drones for more than a decade.
- The company was born in 2014 as a “reaction” to the Russian annexation of Crimea, its CEO said.
- The chief executive spoke with BI about drones, Russia, and the challenges facing his industry.
Ukrainian defense company Athlon Avia has been producing drones for Ukraine’s armed forces for more than a decade.
Artem Vyunnyk, Athlon’s CEO, told Business Insider that the company was founded as a “reaction” to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the Donbas war in 2014.
Since then, Athlon has developed “very close relations with the ministry of defense and with the government,” taking on dozens of state contracts, Vyunnyk said.
Kyiv has ramped up drone production since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying in October that Ukraine was capable of producing 4 million drones a year.
The relatively cheap yet highly effective uncrewed systems are easy to modify and can be used for a range of missions, from surveillance to long-range strikes.
Athlon Avia’s two main products — the A1-CM Furia drone and the ST-35 Silent Thunder loitering munition — are used for aerial reconnaissance and precision strikes, respectively.
Athlon says the catapult-launched A1-CM has a range of up to 50 km (around 31 miles) and has been used for reconnaissance and artillery fire adjustment in eastern Ukraine.
It has provided the system to the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard of Ukraine, and the Security Service of Ukraine, it says.
The ST-35 weapon system is designed to strike targets in densely built urban areas while minimizing collateral damage.
It can be equipped with a number of different warhead types, including high explosive, thermobaric, incendiary, and cumulative, Athlon says.
The ST-35 can fly for up to 60 minutes and has a range of 30 km (around 19 miles), per Athlon’s website.
Vyunnyk told BI that Athlon carries out more than 200 missions per day, which he said helps the company build on its experiences, learn what it does well, and identify areas for improvement.
“It speeds up the development of the product itself, company, and troops because they get much more experience,” he added.
Looking ahead, Vyunnyk said Athlon’s biggest challenge would be supporting artillery units, which are some of the company’s main customers.
Artillery systems and their ranges are growing bigger, Vyunnyk said, “so we have to fly longer and much farther than we used to before that, which demands quite serious changes in the system.”
Vyunnyk pointed to a new plane the company is developing, which he said had to be “two times bigger than a standard Furia” to accommodate the need for more batteries.
The CEO said that another issue facing Ukrainian drone developers is electronic warfare systems, which use the electromagnetic spectrum to disrupt certain signals like GPS and video.
These systems are one of the main defenses against drones and have become increasingly important on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Drone makers have tried to adapt by developing frequency-hopping solutions to help evade such defenses, but Vyunnyk said it was like playing a game of cat and mouse.
“They make new jamming systems while we come up with new solutions for frequency-hopping,” he said. “It’s like a game we are playing with our enemy. Sometimes we are ahead, sometimes we are not. But in general, I would say that we have some kind of balance.”
In its efforts to get more drones to the front lines, the Ukrainian government has taken a number of steps to speed up the procurement process for its forces, providing additional funds for brigades to purchase drone equipment directly and launching a new drone supply model aimed at reducing delivery times.
Such efforts will likely have come as welcome news to local drone manufacturers like Athlon Avia.
In its early days, nailing down state contracts was an uphill battle, Vyunnyk said.
But with the demands of the full-scale war, things have changed.
“Legislation changed. It became much simpler, much more open,” Vyunnyk told BI. “The procedures right now are maybe 20 times easier than they were when we started out.”
However, rising demand has brought its own issues.
The company struggled at the start of the invasion as it had a “lack of components” due to insufficient warehouse stocks, Vyunnyk said.
“Even our suppliers couldn’t supply us with the demanded quantity and sometimes quality of these parts. So I think that to be sure that we will be efficient, we have to make big warehouses with big stocks of drones and components,” he continued.
“We have to plan, we have to calculate, we have to organize production and warehouses and the supply chain to give us enough UAVs.”
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