Combat Experience Forum Furia_Mission_2025: Athlon Avia names the best Furia UAS pilots

In the final week of January, Kyiv hosted the Combat Experience Forum organised by Ukrainian drone manufacturer Athlon Avia. The forum featured the final stage of the Furia_Mission_2025 competition, which identified the best crews operating the Furia reconnaissance UAV. Defender Media was the forum’s media partner and shares the key highlights.

The Furia_Mission_2025 competition launched in September 2025 and took place across several stages, including the collection of operational cases from crews and two roundtable discussions involving leading specialists and media. The Combat Experience Forum marked the final stage of the competition.

According to the organisers, the event became the first platform in Ukraine for an open dialogue between the manufacturer and Furia UAS pilots, aimed at systematically collecting crew experience, generalising it, and transforming it into concrete changes.

The forum programme consisted of two parts: workshops for students and military personnel, and the competition final, featuring a professional panel discussion and the awards ceremony for the winning reconnaissance UAV crews.

Based on multifactor evaluation, the top crews received technical reinforcements:

1st place: crew of the State Border Guard Service UAV unit “Phoenix” — a new pickup truck;
2nd place: crew of the 44th Separate Artillery Brigade — a vehicle-mounted EW system and a generator;
3rd place: crew of the 47th Separate Artillery Brigade — a vehicle-mounted EW system.

In addition, the jury recognised several crews for their diligence and systematic approach, awarding them high-speed satellite communications systems. Every competition participant also received two sets of upgraded batteries for the Furia UAV, branded hoodies, and calendars from the media project “Furia Pilots – 2026”.

The lead pilot of the winning crew, callsign “Advokat”, noted that the greatest value of Furia_Mission_2025 lies in mutual experience sharing. “Right now, this is a critical issue across all areas — the lack of experience exchange that everyone can use,” he said. He also highlighted that Athlon Avia listens closely to users to help them operate the UAS more effectively.

Overall, the Furia_Mission_2025 Combat Experience Forum brought together 150 participants, including 26 Furia UAS crews who participated in the competition and shared practical cases of mission execution, as well as representatives of the General Staff, military units, and military and technical higher education institutions.

Two panel discussions were held during the event, where participants discussed the competition and spoke candidly about how training and the employment of unmanned systems should evolve. The discussions featured Athlon Avia founder and CEO Artem Viunnyk, Deputy Director for Development and Operations at Athlon Avia Serhii Mokreniuk, KAI President Kseniia Semenova, and Executive Director of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry Ihor Fedirko.

According to Athlon Avia CEO Artem Viunnyk, even the most advanced hardware accounts for only 30% of effectiveness. “The real 70% of success in any operation depends on the operator — the person who knows how to extract the maximum from what they have in their hands,” he said. “Furia’s effectiveness is not just wings and a camera; it is, above all, the aggregated experience of hundreds of operators, which through this competition becomes shared knowledge and a weapon of victory.”

“I am close to the approach where a manufacturer builds an ecosystem around its product: training pilots, collecting and processing combat experience, and transferring it between units,” noted Ihor Fedirko, Executive Director of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry. “In effect, by training a pilot to operate their platform, they already do a significant part of the work for that pilot’s future effectiveness with any system.”

Organisers’ conclusions

According to the organisers, the combined results of the participants’ work will form the basis for changes to training programmes in military schools. This will make it possible to prepare new crews according to the standards of those who have already proven effective in combat.

“The effectiveness of the armed forces is based on the ability to quickly transform combat reports into systematic knowledge and training programmes, with the human operator remaining the central focus,” Athlon Avia noted. “This makes it possible to use the full capabilities of the system at 100%.”

Next steps outlined by the organisers:

• All collected conclusions and recommendations will be submitted to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for implementation.
• Crew materials are planned to be used as the basis for training programmes, methodological guidelines, and manuals at military training centres and higher military educational institutions.
• Crew proposals are being taken into account in future technical upgrades of the Furia UAS by the manufacturer.
• Further development of a professional community that directly influences the evolution of Ukrainian weapons.