An An-2 parked in the snow. Credit: www.ariliners.net via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
In September 2020, on the second day of the six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, the Armenian defense forces published a video of one of their units deploying a surface-to-air missile system to target a low-flying, slow-moving object a drone. But what the soldiers shot down was no cutting-edge autonomous weapon: They had destroyed a propeller-driven, single-engine biplane first produced in the 1940s by the former Soviet Union for agricultural monitoring and management a crop duster.
Azerbaijan had evidently converted multiple Antonov An-2 piston-powered light aircraft into uninhabited aerial vehicles. During the conflict, they were repeatedly dispatched on munitions-laden suicide missions used to bait Armenian air defenses. Deployed as a so-called “bait drone,” the An-2 from the September video forced the Armenians to fire their anti-a