RC Direction

RC Direction is a Ukrainian drone manufacturer based in Dnipro that has been developing unmanned aerial systems since 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The company is best known for the Chaklun family of fixed-wing aircraft, which it pitches as a cheaper, easier-to-produce alternative to imported reconnaissance drones and quadcopters. By mid-2025 the firm reported around 170 staff and a manufacturing philosophy built around decentralisation — RC Direction says a full production line can be stood up “anywhere within two months” inside a footprint of roughly 1,200 square metres, with airframe, control systems and telemetry made in Ukraine and electronics, servos and engines sourced abroad.

The Chaklun line spans the full reconnaissance-to-strike spectrum. The baseline Chaklun is a small fixed-wing scout of about 2.8 kg with roughly two hours of endurance and a datalink reach cited at up to 75 km; the Chaklun-K adds a strike role, carrying around 2 kg of ordnance in autonomous and modernised variants. Larger long-range airframes follow: the Chaklun-B 2.0, an internal-combustion reconnaissance platform with a quoted range of up to 900 km and up to eight hours aloft, and the Chaklun-V, a long-range one-way attack drone with a claimed reach of about 700 km. Defence Express reported that Chaklun-V drones were used against the Smolensk Aviation Plant in Russia on 21 January 2025, where one airframe was downed by a Pantsir system and a second struck a production building.

The company’s newest direction is counter-drone interception. The Interceptor 2.0, shown at IDEF 2025, is a turbojet-powered airframe with a top speed of about 320 km/h that runs the firm’s ChaklunLRS automated target-acquisition and auto-lock system to chase down slow reconnaissance and strike UAVs. RC Direction sits among the dense field of wartime Dnipro and Kyiv drone startups — alongside makers such as Fire Point and Culver Aviation — that have moved from prototype to front-line procurement within a single year, and it says it is adding AI algorithms to its platforms to push them toward greater autonomy.