On the night of 20 February 2026, an ATR-72-600 passenger plane operated by Myanmar Nationwide Airways was getting ready for take-off at Myitkyina Airport in Kachin State when it was struck in an alleged First-Particular person View drone assault. State media and official press releases reported that suicide drones brought about minor injury to the nostril, mid-body, and tail sections of the airplane.
In keeping with safety forces, air defence techniques detected the incoming risk, stopping a direct detonation contained in the airport and forcing the gadgets to crash on the runway the place they had been subsequently defused. Fortuitously, no passengers or flight crew sustained accidents.
The army junta was fast responsible the Kachin Independence Military and allied Peoples Defence Pressure items, describing the focusing on of civilian transport infrastructure as a conflict crime. Nonetheless, a spokesman for the Kachin armed group firmly denied the allegations, insisting they don’t have any coverage of attacking civilian airways and took no half within the operation.
Whatever the perpetrator, the airport incident underscores a quickly evolving uneven conflict in Myanmar, a nation now recognised because the world’s second most intensive theatre for drone warfare behind solely Ukraine. Following the 2021 army coup, tech-savvy resistance fighters, together with younger engineers and college students, started weaponising commercially obtainable agricultural and pictures drones to counter the militarys huge superiority in conventional airpower and heavy artillery.
What started as rudimentary operations dropping 3D-printed munitions has remodeled into a complicated, decentralised shadow air drive. Insurgent items have more and more turned to agile First-Particular person View racing drones, modifying them to behave as extremely manoeuvrable loitering munitions able to precision kamikaze strikes in opposition to junta targets.
This alleged strike on a fixed-wing plane follows a transparent sample of more and more audacious anti-aviation operations by insurgent forces. In Could 2025, the Kachin Independence Military efficiently used an analogous drone to down a army Mi-17 transport helicopter that was hovering simply toes off the bottom whereas making an attempt to land with provides in Shwegu. Resistance forces have additionally repeatedly penetrated high-security airspace, executing coordinated kamikaze drone strikes in opposition to the juntas army headquarters and the Aye Lar airbase within the capital metropolis of Naypyidaw.
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