Indian troops trained on homegrown ALAKH attack drone

Indian defense personnel have been trained to fly the ALAKH Kamikaze, a small homegrown attack drone built to keep working under heavy jamming, after the first batch was delivered, according to its maker, EndureAir Systems.

The Noida-based company said on social media on Thursday that its team “successfully conducted a training programme for defence personnel” covering “platform familiarisation, operational procedures and mission readiness.” It didn’t say which service or unit took part, how many troops were trained, or how many drones were delivered.

The ALAKH Kamikaze is a first-person-view drone. Its pilot wears video goggles, watches a live feed from the drone’s camera and steers it into a target, and the drone is destroyed in the attack.

EndureAir said the drone was “designed for tactical operations in challenging Electronic Warfare (EW) environments,” meaning areas where an enemy jams radio and GPS signals to knock drones out of the sky. The company calls its method “Search, Detect and Destroy.”

On its website, EndureAir lists the drone with a 1 kg (2.2-pound) payload, a range of 10 km (6 miles) and a speed of 30 knots. The company says the operator stays in control until the final stage, using live day or night video to assess a target “before deciding whether to engage.”

Small FPV attack drones have become one of the most common weapons in Ukraine, and other militaries are now adding them. The U.S. Marine Corps flew Neros Archer one-way attack drones with live warheads in Japan last month.

EndureAir was set up in 2018 as a startup at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. Its first ALAKH was a 250-gram reconnaissance drone that entered service with the Indian Army in 2023. The company announced the delivery of the kamikaze version in October.

The training, EndureAir said, came with “comprehensive operator training and technical assistance to India’s defence forces.”