The quick explanation for some of the questions I've seen on this story: 1. what is the purpose of building an aircraft that you cannot register? Cigarettes co

The quick explanation for some of the questions I've seen on this story: 1. what is the purpose of building an aircraft that you cannot register? Cigarettes contraband, they fly low in mountain regions between Ukraine and Romania to smuggle cigarettes that are a lot cheaper in Ukraine because in EU taxes are up to 80-90% of the price. We had one of these helicopters crashed last year just doing this. 2. How do they know how to build it? It is not the latest high end technology and there are lots of people that used to work in aviation factories in the region; Ukraine, Romania, Serbia had aircraft factories with thousands of employees. Also the people in the trade of maintaining these helicopters (registered mechanics) have the knowledge and most of the tools needed to assembly it. It is a small, light helicopter, we had one built (legally) in our small hangar by 2 people in their free time. 3. Why don't they sell them legally? Because if you are in the business of selling helicopters to people doing contraband, you don't want to attract any attention, you want to operate under the radar. It is more profitable to sell these to smugglers than to the official market, otherwise the original manufacturing plant would still be selling these with better efficiency of scale. 4. How hard is to do it? In the Transnistria region, it's easy, it's almost lawless. In other places, it's fairly easy to set up such a shop in a lesser populated area if you have a small crew that you can trust. You can eventually have some semi-legit business or repairing agricultural equipment in case anyone sees you carrying stuff around and asks what is that: "tractor spare parts". Police in this area is corrupt, sometimes they are part of the operation providing cover and protecting from investigations, it's just a matter of money changing the right hands.