A word for a new machine

Russian has a word for helicopter that is not borrowed from anyone: vertolyot, roughly the thing that spins and flies. According to his Russian biography, it was coined by Nikolai Kamov and his partner Nikolai Skrzhinsky. Kamov, born in Irkutsk in 1902, had been rejected by a flying unit in 1920 because of an arm injured at birth, so he decided to build aircraft instead. He became the youngest student, and then the youngest graduate, of the Tomsk Technological Institute. His name is still on a marble board there. What followed was a design school that spent the next nine decades doing what almost nobody else dared: putting two rotors on one mast.

The Red Engineer

It began with a gyroplane. In 1929 Kamov and Skrzhinsky built the KASKR-1 Red Engineer, the first Soviet autogyro, and on 25 September 1929 test pilot I. V. Mikheyev lifted it off the ground. Kamov had earlier lost a job at the Junkers concession factory in Moscow after answering a rude German foreman back in fluent German. By 1931 he was leading an autogyro brigade at TsAGI, the central aerohydrodynamic institute. In 1939 the state decided to build a dedicated autogyro factory, with Kamov as chief designer and director, and a young engineer named Mikhail Mil as his deputy.

Autogyros under fire

The TsAGI A-7, first flown on 20 September 1934, became the world’s first combat autogyro. One had been rushed north in 1938 to help rescue Ivan Papanin’s drifting North Pole-1 expedition. In the spring of 1941 the type was pollinating fruit trees in the Tien Shan foothills; by summer the five production A-7-3As were spotting for artillery near Smolensk and dropping leaflets at night. One limped home riddled by heavy machine-gun fire, its observer and pilot both wounded. The bureau itself was evacuated to Bilimbai in the Urals, where the damaged machine was repaired.

Two rotors, no tail

After the war Kamov went all in on coaxial rotors: two contra-rotating rotors stacked one above the other, which cancel each other’s torque and do away with the tail rotor. The result is a short, compact machine, and the Soviet Navy, short of deck space, loved it. The Ka-15 of 1952 became the world’s first mass-produced coaxial helicopter; 375 were built at Ulan-Ude. The turbine-powered Ka-25 Hormone followed in 1961, about 460 of them, and in 1973 the Ka-27 Helix, the family that still hunts submarines for Russia, India and Vietnam. The Ka-32 civil version fights forest fires from South Korea to Serbia.

Black Shark and Alligator

Not every idea worked. The Ka-22 Vintokryl of 1959, a giant winged rotorcraft, set eight world records, including 356.3 km/h in October 1961, but two of the four built crashed with fatal results and the project was dropped. Kamov himself died in Moscow on 24 November 1973. His bureau’s most famous machine came later: the single-seat Ka-50, first flown on 17 June 1982. In 1992 it appeared at Farnborough with a werewolf painted on its fin, then starred in a film called Black Shark, which became its name. It was the world’s first operational helicopter with an ejection seat; explosive bolts blow the rotor blades away before the rocket fires.

Under the same roof as Mil

Only 18 or 19 Ka-50s were built, but the side-by-side two-seat Ka-52 Alligator went into large-scale production at Arsenyev, with more than 196 built. Egypt bought 46. In the war against Ukraine it became one of Russia’s most influential weapons, according to British defence intelligence in 2023, and one of its most heavily lost: the open-source site Oryx had visually confirmed 66 destroyed, damaged or captured by December 2025. By then the bureau no longer existed on its own. In 2019–2020 JSC Kamov was absorbed into the Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant, renamed the National Helicopter Center Mil & Kamov. The two men who began together in a 1939 autogyro factory now share a nameplate again.

Factories

• Ukhtomsky Helicopter Plant · Lyubertsy, Moscow Oblast — Bureau’s home from 1955 to 2017; museum opened 1972, closed 2018
• National Helicopter Center · Tomilino, Moscow Oblast — Shared home with Mil since 2017
• Kumertau Aviation Production Enterprise (KumAPP) · Kumertau, Bashkortostan — Series production of Ka-27, Ka-32 and Ka-226; not owned by Kamov
• Progress · Arsenyev, Primorsky Krai — Builds the Ka-50 and Ka-52; not owned by Kamov

People

• Nikolai Kamov · founder, chief designer — 1902–1973; Hero of Socialist Labour 1972; Tomsk airport named after him
• Nikolai Skrzhinsky · co-designer — Built the KASKR-1 autogyro with Kamov in 1929
• Mikhail Mil · engineer — Kamov’s deputy at the 1939 autogyro plant before founding his own bureau

Records and firsts

• TsAGI A-7: the world’s first combat autogyro, 1941
• Ka-15: world’s first mass-produced coaxial helicopter
• Ka-22: eight class world records, including 356.3 km/h on 7 October 1961 and 16,485 kg lifted to 2,557 m on 24 November 1961
• Ka-50: world’s first operational helicopter with a rescue ejection system