A magic carpet from Irkutsk

On 6 August 1969 a machine the size of an airliner, with a rotor at the tip of each wing, hauled 44,205 kilograms to 2,255 metres above the Moscow region. More than half a century later, no helicopter has lifted more. The Mil V-12 was the work of Mikhail Mil, a man born in Irkutsk in 1909 to a Trans-Siberian Railway employee and a dentist. He once wrote that the old human dream of the magic carpet had been most fully realised in the helicopter. His design bureau then spent decades making that carpet bigger, faster and more numerous than anyone else on earth.

Autogyros at the front

Mil came to rotors through the autogyro. After graduating from the Don Polytechnical Institute at Novocherkassk in 1931, he joined TsAGI, the Soviet central aerohydrodynamic institute, working as an assistant to Nikolai Kamov — the man whose own bureau would become his great rival. When Germany invaded in 1941, Mil was drafted and fought near Yelnya, and his autogyros went to the front too: five machines flew 20 artillery-spotting sorties around Smolensk. On 12 December 1947 the Council of Ministers ordered a helicopter design bureau set up under his leadership.

Mi-8: the helicopter that never stopped

The first product, the Mi-1, flew on 20 September 1948 and became the first mass-produced Soviet helicopter. The Mi-4 followed in 1952 and more than 4,000 were built, Chinese Z-5 copies included. Then, in 1961, came the V-8 prototype. As the Mi-8 and its export twin the Mi-17, it has passed 17,000 examples from Kazan and Ulan-Ude, the most-produced helicopter in history, flown by around 80 countries. In much of the world, the word helicopter simply means a Mil.

The flying tank

Mil’s most notorious child first flew on 19 September 1969: the Mi-24, a gunship that could also carry a squad of troops. Soviet crews called it the flying tank; the Western code name was Hind. In Afghanistan it was the enemy the mujahideen feared most, until shoulder-launched missiles arrived in 1986. A stripped Mi-24 derivative, the A-10, set the absolute helicopter speed record of 368.4 km/h in 1978. Some 2,648 were built, and it remains in service with around 50 countries.

Heavier than anything else

Size was the bureau’s other obsession. The Mi-6 of 1957 was the first helicopter to reach 300 km/h. The V-12 was cancelled once the strategic missiles it was meant to move no longer needed it, but the Mi-26, first flown on 14 December 1977, became the largest helicopter ever put into series production. It dropped insulating material on the stricken reactor at Chernobyl in 1986, carried a frozen woolly mammoth out of Siberia in 1999 and lifted a wrecked American Chinook out of Afghanistan. It also suffered aviation’s worst helicopter disaster, when a missile brought one down at Khankala in 2002, killing 127.

Mil without Mil

Mikhail Mil died in Moscow on 31 January 1970, aged 60, and never saw the Mi-24 enter service or the V-12 win the Sikorsky Prize in 1971. The bureau took his name and kept designing: the Mi-28 attack helicopter, the aerobatic little Mi-34, the Mi-38 transport. In 2006 Mil was folded into the Russian Helicopters holding, and in 2019–2020 it was merged with Kamov, its old rival, into the National Helicopter Center named after both men. The founder’s former boss and his bureau now share a nameplate, and the Mil brand still flies.

Factories

• Moscow Helicopter Plant, Tomilino · Tomilino, Lyuberetsky District, Moscow Oblast — New design and experimental complex near Panki station, first sections working by 1963 and complete by 1966
• Sokolinaya Gora site · Moscow — Former aircraft factory that became State Union Plant No. 3, later No. 329; Mil’s bureau moved here from Tushino in 1951
• Kazan Helicopter Plant · Kazan, Tatarstan — Series production of the Mi-8/Mi-17 since 1965, plus the Mi-14 and Mi-38
• Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant · Ulan-Ude, Buryatia — Second Mi-8 family production line
• PZL-Świdnik · Świdnik, Poland — Licence producer of the SM-1 (Mi-1) and sole builder of the Mi-2

People

• Mikhail Leontyevich Mil · founder and general designer, 1947–1970 — Born Irkutsk 22 November 1909, died Moscow 31 January 1970; Hero of Socialist Labour, Lenin Prize
• Nikolai Kamov · Mil’s early superior at TsAGI — Mil served as his assistant on autogyros; their two bureaus were merged in 2019–2020
• Marat Tishchenko · aerodynamicist, deputy chief designer from the late 1960s — One of Mil’s senior lieutenants at the bureau
• Mikhail Baikalov · test pilot — Made the first free flight of the Mi-1 prototype on 20 September 1948

Records and firsts

• Heaviest payload ever lifted by a helicopter: 44,205 kg to 2,255 m by the V-12, 6 August 1969
• Greatest mass lifted to 2,000 m: 56,768.8 kg by a Mi-26, 1982
• Absolute helicopter speed record of 368.4 km/h by the A-10 (Mi-24 derivative), 21 September 1978, standing until 1986
• Mi-6 became the first helicopter to reach 300 km/h
• Sikorsky Prize for the V-12 as the most powerful helicopter in the world, 1971
• Mil designs have set 69 world records
• Mi-8 family: the most-produced helicopter in history