Mil Mi-24 ‘Hind’

In the mid-1960s Mikhail Mil’s design bureau watched the American war in Vietnam, where troop-carrying helicopters were escorted by armed ones, and proposed a single machine that could do both: carry a squad of soldiers into battle and fight for them once they were on the ground. The Soviet army agreed, and the result was the Mi-24. It took the engines and rotor system of the Mi-8 transport, shrank them on to a slimmer armoured fuselage with a cabin for eight troops, and added stub wings that carried rockets and anti-tank missiles and, in fast flight, took some of the load off the rotor. The prototype first flew on 19 September 1969.

The first production version, the Mi-24A, put its crew under a flat-panelled glasshouse that gave poor protection, so Mil redesigned the front fuselage. The Mi-24D, built from 1973, seats the weapons operator in the nose and the pilot above and behind, each under a separate armoured bubble canopy with a flat bulletproof windscreen. Under the nose a turret carries a four-barrel 12.7 mm machine gun, beside the sight and the Raduga-F aerial that guided the anti-tank missiles hung on the wingtip rails, and the stub wings carry rocket pods or bombs. NATO called it ‘Hind’; Soviet crews called it the Krokodil. The Mi-24V that followed added the Shturm missile, and well over 2,000 of the family were built.

Mi-24s fought throughout the Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and went on to serve more than fifty air arms, many of which still fly them. East Germany’s army aviation flew Mi-24Ds from the late 1970s with two combat helicopter regiments. At reunification in October 1990 they passed to the Bundeswehr, which evaluated them and then retired them within a few years; some went on to Poland, and others to museums, including the two Mi-24Ds now in British collections at Weston-super-Mare and Coventry.