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A 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
>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
Ah, Russia/the Soviet Union, land of “but wait, it gets worse”.
Video of the incident: https://youtu.be/JjpXofja1EM?si=E90kSKtGAwFQoUWN
I'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.
It was heavily overloaded, for the record. But huge machine nonetheless.
Not 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.
That 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.
Even 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_att...
overall i prefer any mode of transport that is not being shot at
Size matters.
Flight 17 was shot down with a Buk missile. Wikipedia says 150 lbs. warhead.
Flight 655 was shot down with 2 SM-2MR missiles. Wikipedia is mum about warhead weight...but the missiles themselves would be over 3,000 lbs. (combined).
Vs. the helicopter was shot down with a 24 lbs. missile, with a 2.6 lbs. warhead.
One extremely clear lesson from WWII was that hitting a fixed-wing aircraft was very different from shooting it down. Size mattered. Once the combatants realized that, they replaced their start-of-war "you might get a hit in just the right spot" pea shooters with the heaviest AA weapons that they could use.
My 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.
I think the OP was saying, fixed wing aircraft are safer in general, and that is before the shooting starts.
Would it make sense to add the 'height' factor? An airplane reaches and does most of its course at 3km, while a helicopter at a much lower heights and thus well within the firing range of far more weapons.
It’s very logical. Rotor wings have a much higher accident rate per flight hour.
I don’t think that is how probability works. The same amount of people will die to helicopter crashes regardless of the helicopter size.
That assumes nothing changes over time. Learn from the first accident and the odds of a second accident should reduce.
Well, 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.
I 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-she...
Russia actually has a pretty strong tradition of pilot safety in the military. For example, the Ka-50 attack helicopter is one of very few such helicopters to be fitted with an ejection seat.
The double Mi-6, the Mi-12, was developed and flown but did not make it into production. You can find video walkthroughs on YouTube.
Looks 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?
The 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.
Probably 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.
I remember that one from being a kid - I had a helicopter card game and it had the same picture as the Wikipedia page.
I'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?
Well 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.
the spruce goose could fly, too. But it wasn't viable
What 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)
Nothing wrong with trains. Trains are cool.
Railroads however...
The 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.
That 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?
Jet inlet covers intended to prevent foreign object damage - bright red so they can't be missed. Standard for basically every jet turbine.
Of 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.
The 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.
There's a picture of it in flight in the article...
It would have been heinously noisy inside.
I 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)
You’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.
C-130 Hercules: The ultimate white noise machine.
CH-46 Sea Knight: The ultimate brown note machine.
AV-8B Harrier: The ultimate tinnitus machine.
I'm surprised how quiet modern helicopters can be made.
Was on a beach a while ago and a coast guard helicopter was flying low and I didn't hear it until it was right over us
This 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.
I think whether or not there’s any truth
It's not entirely untrue and some of the cases where it is are famous but much of the time there were entirely pragmatic considerations and/or consequences of other policy decisions. A few things that come to mind are the many constraints on manufacturing capability and industrial capacity, 'dual use' goals, the size of the country (vs. the quantity of developed infrastructure), etc.
> 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.
My perception was that the Cold War was partly about exploiting this trait, forcing them into financial ruin by running races they couldn’t help but compete in.
Except the US actually made it to the moon with functional equipment and not Ekranoplanz.
What you are describing is an attribute of command-based economies. The typical market-based feedback mechanisms are often non-existent, or dulled - is it economical, is there demand, etc. In USSR everything was produced by state-owned factories, where political leadership would pass down edicts poorly rooted in economic realities and wouldn’t pose questions such as “do we need to make a monster helicopter if 3 smaller helicopter are cheaper to manufacture and operate”.
In some ways today’s China is also guilty of the same kind of folly, hence high speed rail network that isn’t economical to operate so ideological justifications are needed. Or ghost cities. Etc.
Market capitalism has other downsides, such as externalized costs skewing economic calculations, but it’s a different conversation altogether.