By Justin Davis, Drone Camps RC · October 6, 2026
The counter-drone industry has spent years perfecting two ways to stop a hostile drone: jam its signal, or smash into it. On September 28, at the IT Arena tech conference, Ukrainian defense firm Phantom Defence showed off a third approach — catch it. Their new system, called the Mangal, is an FPV interceptor drone that fires a weighted net to physically entangle enemy aircraft mid-flight.
It is one of the more novel ideas to emerge from the fastest-growing segment of the drone world, and it deserves a closer look — not just for what the Mangal is, but for what it says about where counter-drone technology is heading.
The concept is elegantly simple. The Mangal carries net charges; when it closes with a target drone, it fires a weighted net that spreads in flight and wraps around the target. Entangled propellers stop producing lift, and the enemy drone comes down — captured largely intact rather than shattered.
That last point matters more than it might seem. A jammed drone may fly away or crash unpredictably. A kinetically intercepted drone — one rammed by another aircraft — produces debris and destroys any intelligence value in the wreckage. A netted drone, by contrast, can potentially be recovered, examined, and exploited for information about the adversary's hardware, software, and mission. Capture beats destruction when you want answers.
The weighted design of the net is key. Unweighted nets drift and collapse; weights on the net's edges keep it spread during the short flight to the target, maximizing the chance of a clean entanglement. It is the same principle as a fisherman's cast net, adapted for aerial combat at FPV speeds.
The Mangal carries six net charges, giving a single interceptor multiple engagement opportunities per sortie. That is a significant design choice: most interceptor concepts are one-shot weapons. Six charges mean the Mangal can miss — or face multiple targets — and keep fighting.
Two onboard cameras provide situational awareness for the operator, and the system supports automatic target detection. That automation piece is critical. Hitting a small, fast-moving drone with a net requires precise timing; human reflexes alone make it a difficult shot. Automatic detection that cues the operator — or the firing solution itself — dramatically improves the probability of a successful intercept.
The combination suggests Phantom Defence thought hard about the actual engagement sequence: detect at range, close the distance under FPV control, let automation refine the firing solution, fire, assess, and re-engage if needed. Each of the six charges is a fresh chance.
Phantom Defence designed the Mangal for flexible deployment. It can operate from stationary positions — checkpoints, trench lines, infrastructure sites — or mount on vehicles for mobile protection. That flexibility mirrors how the drone threat itself operates: everywhere, unpredictably.
Stationary deployment makes sense for point defense. A checkpoint or a power substation cannot move, so it needs a guardian that can. Vehicle mounting extends that protection to convoys and maneuvering units, which are otherwise exposed during movement — historically the most vulnerable phase for ground forces facing drone threats.
The FPV control scheme is worth noting too. By building the Mangal as an FPV aircraft rather than an autonomous missile, Phantom Defence keeps a human in the loop for the complex parts of the intercept while letting automation handle the split-second firing decision. It is a pragmatic division of labor.
Step back, and the Mangal is part of something bigger: an explosion of creativity in counter-drone technology. The last few years have produced interceptor drones that ram their targets, shotgun-armed systems, high-power microwave concepts, advanced jammers, and now net-firing FPV interceptors. Each approach has tradeoffs, and no single solution has emerged as dominant.
Nets occupy an interesting niche in that landscape. Jamming fails against autonomous or fiber-optic-controlled drones that do not rely on radio links — an increasingly common threat. Kinetic ramming works but destroys the interceptor too. Nets offer a middle path: effective regardless of the target's control link, with the interceptor surviving to fight again and the target potentially recoverable.
For the FPV industry, the counter-drone boom is impossible to ignore. It is the fastest-growing FPV-adjacent segment, it is pulling serious engineering talent, and innovations developed for interceptors — faster motors, better computer vision, more robust airframes — eventually flow back into the hobby and commercial markets.
The Mangal is still new — unveiled weeks ago at a tech conference, with real-world performance yet to be publicly demonstrated. Healthy skepticism is warranted for any defense product announcement. But the idea at its core is sound, the engineering tradeoffs are thoughtful, and the problem it addresses is only getting more urgent. In the rapidly evolving duel between drones and drone-killers, the net-firing interceptor just earned its place on the board.
