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The Soviet Union's Monster Mi-6 Helicopter Airliner
- circus1540 2y agoA figure which stunned me: Mi-26, the successor to the Mi-6 was involved in the deadliest helicopter crash, after being shot down during the second chechen campaign. It was carrying 142 passengers, 127 of which died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Khankala_Mi-26_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Khankala_Mi-26_crash
- LVB 2y ago>the helicopter crash-landed in a minefield that made up part of the federal military headquarters' perimeter defenses. Some of the survivors, attempting to abandon the wrecked Mi-26, are reported to have been killed by 'friendly' anti-personnel mine explosions
- Arn_Thor 2y agoAh, Russia/the Soviet Union, land of “but wait, it gets worse”.
- bell-cot 2y agoNot to dismiss either the "shot down", or loss of life - but that does illustrate why very large passenger helicopters are a bad idea. Too many lives at stake, and a helicopter is generally a far more fragile basket than a fixed-wing aircraft.
- __turbobrew__ 2y agoI don’t think that is how probability works. The same amount of people will die to helicopter crashes regardless of the helicopter size.
- Retric 2y agoThat assumes nothing changes over time. Learn from the first accident and the odds of a second accident should reduce.
- ardaoweo 2y agoWell, it should be noted that the helicopter in question was designed to be used by an organization that couldn't care less about loss of life, as we have again seen in recent years. So I guess this aspect of human life wasn't a big concern to the designers, the military can always get new human resources from Siberia or whatever poor part of the country.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoI object. I think our Media is a great disappointment. We’ve spent 20 years in the Middle East, but the general public didn’t learn anything, The idea of local culture is as uninformed as it was at the start of the war. As a result we will make the same mistake again. The reporting about war in Ukraine is the same - basically a caricature of reality. Sidenote: population of Texas and population of Siberia is about the same. Russia has a cruel culture, but their population is only 1/4 of EU’s. Articles that ask probing questions are only now starting to appear, but are extremely rare. For example: “Russia is producing artillery shells around three times faster than Ukraine's Western allies and for about a quarter of the cost” https://news.sky.com/story/russia-is-producing-artillery-shells-around-three-times-faster-than-ukraines-western-allies-and-for-about-a-quarter-of-the-cost-13143224 https://news.sky.com/story/russia-is-producing-artillery-she...
- nradov 2y agoYes, NATO countries have hollowed out their military-industrial complexes. Everyone is aware now that was a mistake but it will take time to rebuild the industrial capacity necessary to fight wars of attrition. And of course it's cheaper to manufacture artillery shells in Russia since the country has lower wages and is now running a partially mobilized command economy. But once you normalize for quality of the shells, the difference isn't quite as bad as it first looks.
- bell-cot 2y ago> isn't quite as bad That phrase sounds about right. Though my impression is that shell production is still a "meh, I guess we probably should do something..." priority in the great majority of NATO countries.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoThat thought is not very logical. Very large passenger fixed wings are also a very bad idea and fragile if the premise is someone is shooting at them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
- lvspiff 2y agoEven ground based large passenger non-winged transports are a bad idea if someone is shooting at them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_railway_station_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_railway_station_att... overall i prefer any mode of transport that is not being shot at
- medo-bear 2y agoWhat do you know, even sea based large passenger transport is a bad idea if someone is shooting at them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania Funny anecdote, my first air travel was in an Mi-8 as a 6 year old being airlifted out of a war zone
- _heimdall 2y agoMy grandfather flew in WWII and had many stories of both his planes and those in his group making it back with what mechanics would have thought was catastrophic damage. Shooting down any aircraft with a rocket is likely to take anything down. Planes can handle damage much better from what I understand.
- coolspot 2y agoVideo of the incident: https://youtu.be/JjpXofja1EM?si=E90kSKtGAwFQoUWN https://youtu.be/JjpXofja1EM?si=E90kSKtGAwFQoUWN
- datameta 2y agoIt was heavily overloaded, for the record. But huge machine nonetheless.
- kabes 2y agoI've been in mi-26s a couple of times (friend of mine used to have 3 of them in storage) and up close it's almost unbelievable the thing can fly.
- adolph 2y agoThe double Mi-6, the Mi-12, was developed and flown but did not make it into production. You can find video walkthroughs on YouTube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_V-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_V-12
- belter 2y agoLooks a fascinating piece of equipment out of Sci-Fi Anime... Noticed something interesting from the first flight: "...A first flight on 27 June 1967 ended prematurely due to oscillations caused by control problems; one set of main wheels contacted the ground hard bursting a tyre and bending a wheel hub..." The cause of the oscillations proved to be a harmonic amplification of vibrations in the cockpit floor feeding back into the control column when a roll demand was input into the cyclic stick How would they go about diagnosing such a complex interaction in the Sixties?
- adolph 2y agoProbably similar to now mechanically. They got the chinook and others up and going during the same time period. Although I guess the Chinook was quite a bit easier since its mass was distributed out toward the rotors instead of clustered between them.
- NikkiA 2y agoThe Mi-6 had some pretty horrible harmonics issues too, if you search on youtube there are videos of them attempting to start one that's at a museum, and several times they abort the startup because the whole helicopter is rocking backwards and forwards after starting the second engine.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoI remember that one from being a kid - I had a helicopter card game and it had the same picture as the Wikipedia page.
- fnord77 2y agoI'm a little sad this article doesn't do any analysis on why or why not such a large pax chopper would be viable. Is there any hope that eVTOL drones can do what this was supposed to, namely hops between near cities and taking people places without large runways?
- nradov 2y agoWell obviously it's viable in the sense that it could fly. But aviation projects in the USSR were based more on the whims of Party leaders than on any sort of rational economic viability. Current designs for eVTOL aircraft are very short ranged due to limited battery capacity. At most they'll be used by a few wealthy passengers for short hops within highly congested cities. And they won't be drones; it will be many years before the FAA even considers certifying drones for carrying paying passengers, especially in airspace where VFR aircraft operate ("see and avoid"). Human pilots will be in command.
- fnord77 2y agothe spruce goose could fly, too. But it wasn't viable
- bluGill 2y agoWhat is wrong with a train for short trips? There is nothing wrong with 1825 ideas with some small modernization (electric trains are still 1800s technology - though these days I would add autonomy which is still 1990s technology in trains unlike most places where it is still science fiction)
- 0x457 2y agoNothing wrong with trains. Trains are cool. Railroads however...
- moffkalast 2y agoThe noise pollution that comes with trains is pretty ghastly too. Living next to a train track is just complete hell if you want to ever leave your windows open, cause every 30 minutes you won't be able to hear yourself think for about a minute. Road traffic is at least constant so you can sort of filter it out. Subways and trams are get a pass though.
- MarkusWandel 2y agoThat red stuff inside the turbine intakes, what is it? The kind of cover they put in when the planes are in storage? So that whole photo is staged?
- nradov 2y agoOf course it's a staged publicly photo. That's nothing unusual. The "red stuff" is just regular turbine intake covers that are commonly used when certain aircraft are parked outside.
- dmix 2y agoThere's a picture of it in flight in the article...
- bo0tzz 2y agoThe article mentions it being shown at the Paris Air Show with exhibit code H-239. I'm pretty sure that's what the picture is from.
- 15155 2y agoJet inlet covers intended to prevent foreign object damage - bright red so they can't be missed. Standard for basically every jet turbine.
- Waterluvian 2y agoThis is quite likely just a reflection of my biases in learning and taught history, but so much of what the Soviets worked on feels rooted in a sort of “that’ll show them!” inferiority complex. I see similar things in North Korea and Russia too today where it’s almost like a lot of their efforts are based on a hypothetical checklist labelled “What Modern Nations Look Like” I think whether or not there’s any truth to my perception, it’s why I find a lot of Soviet stuff to be so fascinating in a science fictiony kind of way.
- ivankuz 2y ago> so much of what the Soviets worked on feels rooted in a sort of “that’ll show them!” inferiority complex That's what the Cold War was about, innit? Same reason why the US went to the moon.
- bamboozled 2y agoExcept the US actually made it to the moon with functional equipment and not Ekranoplanz.
- dieortin 2y agoThe soviets put the first satellite and man in space, so I bet they had functional equipment too
- ein0p 2y agoFirst woman in space too, and a very long list of other firsts some of which remain untouched by anyone else (eg landing in the surface of Venus and sending digital pictures back). Valentina Tereshkova went to space in 1963, at a time when women in the US had to ask their husband’s permission to open a bank account.
- bamboozled 2y agoThey did not get to the moon though did they, which is what we were discussing.
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- ggm 2y agoIt would have been heinously noisy inside.
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- PreInternet01 2y agoI can't say anything about the Mi-6, but its successor, the Mi-26, definitely isn't that loud. Definitely "huge transport aircraft" loud, but not "C-130 loud" (where, if you sit just behind the forward bulk head, kidney stone removal is an automatic benefit included with take-off)
- openasocket 2y agoYou’ve had the opportunity to fly in both an Mi-26 and a C-130? I’d be curious to know more about your career, I can’t imagine there are many who have spent time in both.
- PreInternet01 2y agoWell, the C-130 has been pretty much everywhere pretty much forever -- not sure if anyone in the military in the last 5 decades or so has not been in and/or near them at some point? My Mi-26 experience was as a staff tech (military, but as part of a humanitarian effort) airlifting medical trucks into a flood-struck area in India, like, 30 years ago or so, but as I understand it, they're still used pretty widely outside NATO, even today.
- openasocket 2y ago> Well, the C-130 has been pretty much everywhere pretty much forever -- not sure if anyone in the military in the last 5 decades or so has not been in and/or near them at some point? Very true. I had the impression that the Mi-26 was considerably more niche, and that there wouldn't be a ton of overlap between operators of the C-130 and the Mi-26. However, I just checked the list of operators on wikipedia (not sure how accurate that is) and Algeria, Jordan, India, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela all field both. There also seems to be civilian operators of the Mi-26.