Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to sit in any of them. It is a gunship. It is also, improbably, a bus. Imagine bolting a cannon, a fistful of rockets and anti-tank missiles onto an armoured personnel carrier, giving it a rotor and telling it to go to war, and you are most of the way to understanding the aircraft NATO calls the “Hind.”

That dual personality is not a quirk. It is the entire point. The Mi-24 was built to arrive over a battlefield, suppress whatever was shooting at your side, and then land and disgorge up to eight fully equipped soldiers from the cabin behind the cockpit. No Western attack helicopter has ever tried to do both at once, which is why, decades on, the Hind still has no true equivalent in NATO service.

A flying infantry fighting vehicle

The concept belongs to Mikhail Mil, one of the great names of Soviet rotorcraft. By the late 1960s Mil had become convinced that the future of the battlefield lay in what he described as flying infantry fighting vehicles: aircraft that could deliver firepower and troops in the same sortie, the way a ground vehicle carries both a gun and a squad. The Americans in Vietnam had shown what armed helicopters could do, but their machines tended to specialise. Mil wanted both in one airframe.

He got his way. A prototype first flew in September 1969, the year before Mil’s death, and the type entered Soviet service in 1972. Much of the airframe drew on the proven Mi-8 transport, which is partly why the Hind ended up with such a generous cabin. What emerged was enormous by helicopter standards, fast, heavily armed and wrapped in armour, a genuinely new kind of flying machine.

Engineering the beast

Under the skin, the Hind is muscular in the most literal sense. Two Isotov (later Klimov) TV3-117 turboshaft engines sit on top of the fuselage, each producing roughly 2,200 shaft horsepower. They turn a large five-blade main rotor of around 17.3 metres, with a three-blade tail rotor doing the anti-torque work. All that power gives the Hind a genuinely startling turn of speed for something so large; it comfortably exceeds 300 km/h (over 190 mph), and a specially modified example set an absolute helicopter speed record of 368.4 km/h back in 1978.

The speed is no accident. Unlike most helicopters, the Hind has stubby aerodynamic wings jutting from its flanks. They carry weapons, yes, but in fast forward flight they also generate a meaningful slice of the lift, unloading the rotor and letting the aircraft charge along like a very angry aeroplane. The trade-off is agility: those same wings make it reluctant in a tight turn, which is why Hind crews prefer to fight fast and straight rather than get dragged into a knife-fight.

Then there is the armour. The titanium rotor blades shrug off machine-gun fire, the crew sit inside a titanium-armoured tub behind ballistic glass, and the cabin can be over-pressurised to keep out contamination. This is a helicopter designed on the assumption that people will be shooting at it, and quite a lot of them will hit.

Flying tank, crocodile, drinking glass

An aircraft this distinctive was never going to escape nicknames, and the Hind collected them like campaign medals. Soviet crews called it the letayushchiy tank, the “flying tank,” a nod to the armoured Il-2 Shturmovik of the Second World War. They also called it the “Crocodile” (Krokodil), after the mottled green camouflage and the long, reptilian nose, and the “Drinking Glass” (Stakan), thanks to the flat, faceted glass panels of the early cockpits.

A long, well-travelled career

The Hind’s combat debut came with Ethiopian forces during the Ogaden War of the late 1970s, but it was the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 that cemented its reputation. There it did everything Mil had envisaged: close air support, escort, transport and reconnaissance, often all in the same day. Crews grew so confident in the machine that they threw it around in ways its designers had assumed were impossible.

Beyond Afghanistan, the Hind turned up almost everywhere the late twentieth century had a conflict. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi Hinds and Iranian AH-1 SeaCobras fought what remain the only confirmed helicopter-versus-helicopter air battles in history. And because the type was exported enthusiastically, usually as the downgraded Mi-25 and Mi-35 versions, Hinds ended up in the service of dozens of nations. As of 2026 the type is still operated by more than 50 countries, which for a design first flown in 1969 is a remarkable innings.

Why the Hind endures

Newer, sleeker gunships have come along, including Mil’s own Mi-28, which quietly dropped the troop cabin, yet the Mi-24 refuses to retire. Part of that is sheer numbers and ruggedness: it is cheap to keep flying, tolerant of rough conditions, and formidable to face. Part of it is that nothing has genuinely replaced its odd party trick of being gunship and troop carrier in a single machine.

But mostly the Hind endures because it is unforgettable. It is loud, imposing in an oddly magnificent way, and unmistakable from a mile off. Half a century after Mikhail Mil sketched out his flying infantry fighting vehicle, the crocodile is still in the air, and it still turns heads on every ramp it lands on.

The Hind in the air — a display of the flying tank.

Sources: Wikipedia (Mil Mi-24); Vertical Magazine (Elan Head); The Aviation Geek Club; Wikimedia Commons.