What a crazy story. Would be interesting to read a more in-depth article on underground helicopter manufacturing.
I wonder how that would work in the US? I don't think there's anything illegal about building your own aircraft. That's basically what the EAA is all about I think.
However, there are many commercial uses which experimental aircraft are not approved for. This mostly limits their practical utility to personal use (aka “fun”).
Was stalled on downwind turn, fell through electric wires, hung by last wire, communication cable, airplane came to full stop approx 10' off ground, rolled over on its back and dropped upside down on a clump of small scrub oak trees. No prop strike and no injury to pilot.
the realpolitik in this particular case probably goes deeper
"Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region."
You can build you own, manufacturing and selling them requires all kinds of hoops and certification. I believe if you build you have to do 51% of the work or it's not considered experimental.
1st i've heard of this as well (though i'm not in the loop on these kinds of things)
that said, you might enjoy the topic of 'narco subs' which are illicit submarines manufactured to smuggle drugs (mostly from latin america to the US as I understand it)
Perhaps the story isn't so crazy if the operation is performed by bootsrtappy aerospace and mechanical engineers with experience building real Kamov helicopters but who simply don't have the authorization to do so. I mean, it's not the first time where resourceful engineers from former soviet republics show their skills to earn a living.
Indeed. Reading the article and comments here, this, to me, looks like it could ‘just’ be a case of gray imports (on steroids).
They could get original parts (but through unofficial channels), have qualified personnel use official tools to assemble a helicopter, test it and sell it as real, but don’t get external confirmation that they used good parts and followed correct procedures.
Of course, without the external checks, it becomes easier to increase margins by getting second-hand parts, use unqualified personnel, don’t use official tools and do less quality testing.
1) Are these people barred from legitimately selling helicopters? Perhaps some sanctions?
2) Making a helicopter fly with the right engineering and control system is monumentally difficult - doesn't matter if its a knock off, assembled from parts or OEM.
3) Where did they get the skills and how did they acquire them? Did they have the capital to purchase a few originals and take them apart?
4) At this point, why not just sell them legitimately? Regulatory requirements prohibitive?
It's worth keeping in mind where this happened - a place where there's still a lot of gear, expertise, parts etc kicking about. Nearby Romania was once a licensed producer of this particular type of old Soviet utility helicopter. Corruption is endemic and the line between 'legitimate' business and one that isn't can be blurry and change over time, both intentionally by the operators and due to shifting political fortunes.
Yeah and Russia has had a big military presence in Transnistria for a long time. They mention a lot of the workers coming across the river into Moldova. I bet they are all ex-helicopter mechanics for the Russian army that used to work on this model, and someone had the idea that they could make more money building the helicopters instead of fixing them.
Heart valves I can understand, if the difference is between not being able to afford them at all and a bootleg version…relevant username, by the way ;)
I can't help but wonder: Who, exactly, wants to buy helicopters from such fly-by-night operators?
For there must be demand. Otherwise all the planning, capital raising, investment, hiring, construction, accounting, etc. necessary for starting and operating this bootleg helicopter factory would have never been done in the fist place.
Who would want to buy bootleg helicopters? Is it developing countries seeking to save a bit of money by buying them in the black market? Or two-bit dictators who cannot buy helicopters through more, ahem, official channels due to trading sanctions? Assorted unsavory characters from the criminal underworld? Self-made entrepreneurs who want to get a good deal on a "genuine-looking" Soviet helicopter?
The parts for the helis might have come from an old factory that shut down, the parts might have been bought very cheap. Someone then decided to build some helis with the parts but clearly decided to forego the permit process and just forge all of the paperwork the customer gets. Someone buying them might have just been expecting a good deal on an older design but still legit helis or they knew they were not legit and were planning to resell them to other groups. I'm not sure anyone would actually want to fly in a heli they knew had forged paperwork.
Perhaps if they were part of organized crime groups and/or people in the disputed region and are unable to buy and maintain a legal helicopter, it might be of consideration.
The buyer is not necessarily sitting in it, people have built submarines powered by humans to smuggle drugs after all.
>I'm not sure anyone would actually want to fly in a heli they knew had forged paperwork
I don't know anything about aircraft. However if I was to fly myself one I'd want to know enough about it to verify its safety independently. If I had the skill to verify the safety independently (effectively I'd have to be a pilot/helicopter mechanic), I wouldn't care all that much about the paperwork.
They probably colluded with state operators to funnel budgets for these things knowing they won’t ever be used.
This probably happens a lot everywhere with everything. It’s only a matter of time until a small town has a million dollar cloud services contract for their, you know, digital services and stuff (to backup files ... and stuff).
or colluded with the wrong state's operators.. backstory on this one I'm sure could be an interesting movie or 3 ..
"Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region."
It's rather fascinating what the human mind can do with money + necessity. It's a reminder that great engineers can come from anywhere (and hopefully brought to work on nice-people things).
Great find! Thanks for this. But after reading I wonder how many of these subs can be out there crossing waters of the USA while the whole coast on both sides are monitored full time on irregularities by the US military?
It's a big coast and the monitoring systems may be old and not suitable for detecting mini-subs. Much of the defense of the US was conceived for a completely different type of threat. We expected Soviet nuclear subs, not small battery powered craft that may not even be manned.
I don't suppose it will be long, if it hasn't happened already, before unmanned drones will be delivering most of the illicit cross-border shipments. You could cheaply build a fleet of them and overwhelm most coastal defenses.
The recent spike in radioactive isotopes had me thinking of this. If someone has a modest amount of money and no regard for safety, it's actually pretty easy to assemble a reactor.
There are a lot of things we think are out of the reach of individuals or small groups of people, but the fact is someone developed many of these technologies in more primitive times without access to modern materials or the internet. We live in an age where morons can make armed drones or cruise missles, or, apparently, counterfeit helicopters.
> If someone has a modest amount of money and no regard for safety, it's actually pretty easy to assemble a reactor.
My understanding is that building a reactor is fairly easy (possibly even in reach of a smart high-school kid). But that getting hold of the enriched uranium required to run a reactor is (thankfully) rather difficult due to trade and production being heavily controlled.
Fusion is one thing. The farnsworth style fusors are relatively easy to make. I'm talking about fission, which is a bit more difficult, but actually could be made possible with the neutrons emitted by a farnsworth reactor(or a bunch of other ways that don't require high voltage/high vacuum).
Enriched uranium is hard to acquire but it's not hard to make if you have a source of thermal neutrons. You can get thermal neutrons in a number of ways. I'm not going to get into the details, but establishing criticality is not easy, but it's not hard either, at least if you're not concerned with safety.
But enriching uranium isn't rocket science. You gassify uranium as uranium hexifluoride, centrifuge it, extract the heavier (uranium-238) fraction, and then turn the uranium-238-enriched gas into solid uranium oxide (recycle the fluorine).
It's not rocket science, and there are other methods available as well. It does take a lot of energy and time though. Probably easier for a low tech setup to just bombard U-238 with thermal neutrons.
Once you get enough U-235, just use beryllium to reflect the neutrons back in and add a moderator(water, graphite, etc). Just don't be anywhere near it when it finally goes critical.
But working with fluorine compounds is seriously dangerous, and the process requires literally hundreds of centrifuges working day and night for months to produce the required amounts of 238
A small surprise for me was learning that you can buy a fully functional tank in America for relatively little cash. Where I come from, even the thought of anybody but the army owning a tank is absurd.
In my country those fakes were always sold as originals. To make this believable, they were sold as stolen.
So you'd be approached on the street by a someone who looked sketchy and offered a Rolex for USD$100. They'd open a bag and let you look into it to see the Rolex while they made a big deal about checking to see that there were no cops around.
If you declined, they'd drop the price by half. Must have been effective because they did it for years.
might be worth pointing out that this happened in Transnistria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria) a part of Moldova that has stronger political ties to Russia than to Moldova. It's complicated.
Not the GP, but probably the "complicated" part is that the Moldovan prosecutors would not be able to shut down an illegal factory in Transnistria, which is de facto independent. The fact that the workers were from Transnistria probably provided them some type of immunity for a while. It's quite unlikely that the factory and the operation itself was really unknown. It's more likely that for political reasons, the authorities needed to turn a blind eye to it. What exactly changed now, who knows? It's complicated ...
The factory was on on Moldova's territory. Why would
"authorities need to turn a blind eye to it" is beyond my comprehension. What kind of "political reasons"? That is unless they were simply paid off and are regular crooks.
Got any proof of that? It looks more like you just being "creative"
Indeed, I don't have proof. As I said, I was not the original poster, I was just exercising a bit of critical thinking.
Now, I started reading a bit into this. What I got so far is this: the authorities kept an eye on this operation for a few months. They arrested the main guys, who indeed reside on the other side of the river. These guys claim to be some sort of "inventors" who were simply experimenting with these helicopters and trying to overcome some technical obstacles. They say what they are doing on their property should not be anyone's business: they were indeed assembling helicopters, but did not sell yet anything. Given that, the authorities claim that the illegal things they did now include flying the helicopters for short periods of time without permission to fly, and bringing in the country various technical components without proper custom declarations (they had entire engines there, which they sourced from some engine manufacturers). If it comes to these types of arguments, the whole case does not appear so slam dunk.
The Transnistria angle, I'm not sure if there was one. There could be a faint one, in the fact that the prosecutors did not want to arrest some resident of Transistria without a watertight case, so that's why they waited for months. Now some people claim they messed up anyway.
Transnistria claimed independence a while ago. Only Russia acknowledges their claim but de facto Moldova has lost the monopoly on violence in that small region.
Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. Step 1 is a "separatists" group pops up overnight and declares independence. Step 2 is the totally legit "separatists" happen to do exactly the things Russia would do if they had annexed the place per se. Step 3 is Russia acknowledges the "independence" of the "breakaway" region and also denies being behind the separatists to begin with. Step 4 is Western leaders send strongly worded letters and symbolic sanctions. Step 5 is everyone forgets and the relationship status is set to "it's complicated".
This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare".
Perhaps so, Russian actions covert or overt are not justifiable.
However it should kept in mind all of these areas were part of Soviet Union, it is not unreasonable for pockets of broken up CIS states to want to split away, they could be ethnically Russian minority being oppressed and want to join Russia or be independent even., their problems may be genuine.
"Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. ... This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare"."
I don't think you have made even the slightest effort to research the issue before regurgitating this stale bit of Russophobic propaganda.
You could start from wiki [0]:
In the 1980s ... in the Moldavian SSR in particular, there was a significant resurgence of pro-Romanian nationalism among ethnic Moldovans. The most prominent of these movements was the Popular Front of Moldova. In the spring of 1988, PFM demanded that the Soviet authorities declare Moldovan the only state language, return to the use of the Latin alphabet, and recognise the shared ethnic identity of Moldovans and Romanians. The more radical factions of the Popular Front espoused extreme anti-minority, ethnocentric and chauvinist positions, calling for minority populations, particularly the Slavs (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) and Gagauz, to leave or be expelled from Moldova.
On 31 August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the only official language with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldovan-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the official language, which served as the medium of interethnic communication, and by the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania, as well as the ethnocentric rhetoric of the Popular Front. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for equal status to be given to both Russian and Moldovan. Transnistria's ethnic and linguistic composition differed significantly from most of the rest of Moldova. The share of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians was especially high and an overall majority of the population, some of them ethnic Moldovans, spoke Russian as a mother tongue. Ethnic Moldovans accounted for less than 40% of Transnistria's population in 1989.
The nationalist Popular Front won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in the spring of 1990, and its agenda started slowly to be implemented. On 2 September 1990, the Pridnestrovian [Russian for Transnistrian] Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed as a Soviet republic by an ad hoc assembly, the Second Congress of the Peoples' Representatives of Transnistria. Violence escalated when in October 1990 the Popular Front called for volunteers to form armed militias to stop an autonomy referendum in Gagauzia, which had an even higher share of ethnic minorities. In response, volunteer militias were formed in Transnistria. In April 1990, nationalist mobs attacked ethnic Russian members of parliament, while the Moldovan police refused to intervene or restore order.
In the interest of preserving a unified Moldavian SSR within the USSR and preventing the situation escalating further, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, while citing the restriction of civil rights of ethnic minorities by Moldova as the cause of the dispute, declared the Transnistria proclamation to be lacking legal basis and annulled it by presidential decree on 22 December 1990.
This doesn't seem to be correct. According to the press releases from the Moldovan Prosecutor-General's office, the factory is "in a locality in the Criuleni District", so it's in territory controlled by the Moldovan government. But several individuals associated with this operation, including its leader, live in territory that the Moldovan government does not control (i.e. in Transnistria). This latter complication is specifically mentioned.
Am I missing something? Is this easy to do? Doesn't manufacturing a helicopter require very expensive and sophisticated equipment and supply chains? I'd think that would leave fingerprints all over.
On the other hand, when I watch videos of boat building, it seems like it can be done by small shops with a few people. So maybe there is some equivalent tier of manufacturing for aircraft?
>Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region.
this and Donbass are regions where reality is significantly distorted from our typical everyday reality. In particular, laundering helicopters (and the components for them like engines) through there wouldn't look as anything exceptional. It is strange that it was located on Moldova controlled territory though - while right on on the border with yet still not in Transnistria proper.
Update: According to the shop owner it were just full-scaled models which he's been using to develop his innovations, and he does have some patents for various equipment for helicopters - in Russian https://dumskaya.net/news/vladeletc-vertoletnogo-zavoda-pod-...
What makes you say reality is distorted in either of those regions?
One is a breakaway province that fought a civil war with its originating nation in 1992, with some amount of Russian involvement. In that time period, the Soviet Union was falling apart, and all sorts of regions were breaking off from their parent governments - a few of them through incredibly bloody conflicts between different ethnic groups.
The other is the site of a bit of an active shooting war between Russia and Ukraine, because Ukraine was leaning too far to the West, and Russia didn't want to lose its warm water port.
About the only thing that they have in common is that neither is recognized by the world (But neither is Taiwan), and that Russia was involved in various degrees...
Mind bogglingly stupid to shut something like this down. Legalize it instead. Government should fill out the paperwork at their own expense, and compensate the owners of this sufficiently so that they could continue this manufacturing business in "above board" ways.
Exactly. The right response would have been "I'm not even mad, this is amazing!" It's not like Moldova is a powerhouse of industry or anything. Anyone who managed to pull this off deserves a shot at turning it into one.
Seems like the gap between no helicopter all and a working helicopter is smaller than between a working helicopter and one that's compliant with regulations. It's not like there's an abundance of helicopter manufacturers of any kind in Moldova.
Yeah, this is the strangest but also coolest news I read about Moldova in a long time haha
If the government weren't such sad sacks of potatoes, they could maybe offer some help in setting up an actual legal production.
But nah, just arrest them and be done with it. Who cares, right?
Reminded me of the news about them seizing "hard drugs" from a "highly organized" group... Just some guys growing cannabis in their garden. They probably got 5-10 years, meanwhile there's bootleg "wine" (water+alcohol+sweetener, tastes absolutely horrible) in shops for nearly a decade and people drinking themselves to death.
im originally from moldova and this is so weird seeing somthing like this on hn homepage ... so ridiculous.
article doesnt mention the city, does it? would be interesring to know if thats transnistria, in which case its pretty much russian and moldova has mostly nothing to do with it.
> Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region.
What this entire story is missing is that the guy is an engineer and he was building full scale models (according to his story) to test his research, he already has some patents from 2015, which kinda make his story a bit more credible. Knowing how competent the police is in Moldova, it will not surprise me that they just fucked up...
The other question is, who in their right mind would buy such helicopters(if you can call them helicopters :D )? I wouldnt even get close to one...
I wonder if they're trying to scam baddies (who else buys copters in the black market?), they could deliver these copters with some final assembly required, e.g. to install the blades of the main rotor, maybe leave 1 technician with the clients, or just hire a technician who isn't in on the scam and let him be the discoverer of the bad news...
Alternatively, these are capable copter builders with parts which have "fallen off the back of trucks" in Russia (or even an inside group stealing parts from the official factory).
It's not that crazy if you consider that it was a part of the Soviet Union, where these helis were designed and produced at two different factories. Ka-26 is a fairly old and relatively simple helicopter with two radial engines, no complex turbomachinery. They probably did this with the old Soviet equipment and documentation, both either smuggled or maybe even bought legally. The experts from Buryatia or Bashkortostan who produced them back in the USSR might have also been involved in this.
So my guess these are not "fake" helicopters but probably "real" Ka-26s, it was just an unlicensed production. Still impressive though.
The real issue (IMHO) is highlighted in the article:
>All the helicopters were produced without the necessary permits and documents of origin for the parts and equipment used.
In aerospace it's common to speak of certificates of conformance, which is a legal attestation from the manufacturer that the part is of genuine origin and complies with the specification from the aircraft's type design. The manufacturer is periodically audited/assessed for their quality control practices and parts are routinely tested to ensure they are airworthy.
The issue here, as per the above quote, is that they were probably using bootleg parts from random Chinese suppliers, which might be no big deal but might also have not been heat treated properly, for example, in order to save manufacturing cost.
If parts aren't compliant with the spec you can have structural failures in flight which is of course no bueno.
So yes, these are probably "real" Kamovs in the sense that they're probably built from real Kamov blueprints, but what many people outside the industry don't realize is that aerospace design and manufacturing encompasses much more than the blueprint. The whole program from the drawing board to the assembly line to the in-service maintenance work has to be a cohesive whole in order to produce an airworthy product.
My brother-in-law does fire/crop dusting with a turbine helicopter. My mentality of what an airplane annual should look like is profoundly different then what he considers 'normal maintenance' on what he uses for work. Every single part of one of those machines has a ridiculously short time to live.
I've heard rumors that parts past their time to live would ship to less rigorous countries. Likely a bunch of EOL parts in the mix too.
Aircraft parts also generally have tighter engineering margins (strength etc) than other engineered products because there's a huge need to keep weight to a minimum. If they're not built according to the design, as you say, no bueno.
But still have to cover very wide operational margins (they are overspecced) because many failures are catastrophic so they can't run on the edge of failing all the time.
It is matter of availability and price for any customer , particularly a desperate one ( organized crime groups in war affected regions ?)
FAA and certifications have improved safety a lot , most people however would still get on a unmodified 737 MAX if it was cheapest/only option available .
The turbomachinery is by far more simpler than high performance piston engines.
A car engine of 200kw only needs to give peak power for a few seconds of acceleration, and can be electronically safeguarded from outside of envelope operation.
An avia engine of 200kw needs to be able to operate on its full rated power continuously, for longer continuous periods of operation, be many times as reliable as a car engine, be lighter than a car engine, be engineered to accommodate, and survive failures, and be engineered free of governor mechanisms of any kind that may fail on take off (engine governor having to deliver demanded performance even if it has to waste the engine)
I can’t speak to helicopters, but light aircraft engines tend to run at 80% of peak; peak is only used for takeoff and go around, to my knowledge. (Not a pilot)
Depends on the aircraft and engine. Some (like my little Rotax 912ULS) has a peak power at which I can only operate at for 1 minute during takeoff. I typically cruise around 70% peak.
I believe in Helicopters you're often running at 90%+ max rated power, but on an engine that's derated from its true maximum power.
Ah yes you're correct. I use 1 minute as my personal limit so I don't grow accustomed to running it too hard for too long, but the operator's manual indeed states 5 minutes above 5500. I have a fixed pitch prop, which means I typically can only spin the prop at those speeds during cruise anyhow.
Generally speaking on combustion (piston) engines the max torque (and efficiency) is at revs between 2/3 and 3/4, sometime 4/5 of power peak revs, and in "static" applications (i.e. when you don't have an accelerator that you use continuously) such as aviation but also power generators, hydraulic loaders and excavators, etc. they normally are operated (continuously) at those levels range (around max torque).
There are 200kw car engines that in reality can be pushed to ~600kw with minimal modification. I'm sure you could run a 2JZ at 80% for thousands of hours.
I wouldn't bet on it. The safety record of auto engines converted for aircraft use (generally in homebuilt/experimentals) is not very favorable. Auto engines are designed to cruise at 10% power or less with brief excursions to higher power. An aircraft engine runs at 75% power for hours continuously, and even with modifications, auto engines historically have not delivered the reliability of the essentially 1930s designs of aircraft piston engines.
I suppose the major problem (aside from questionable parts, etc) is that in some factory processes, especially in less developed places, the documentation only captures so much of what has to be done to make something work right.
It usually turns out there's some knowledge during assembly that is preserved by someone or something that's not in the documentation, that is insidiously hidden until you find out later it's gone wrong. And when someone tries to copy the process off of the pure documentation (or worse, just reverse engineering the thing with no documentation), that unwritten process is lost.
And then, you're going to get someone down the line who wonders, "what's this unnecessary part for?" and removes it or ignores when it's missing, and suddenly your rotors start flying apart after 100 hours or something.
At least when the knockoff Hasselblad (Kiev) cameras failed, it just led to a stuck film crank that could be reset, or when a Lada broke down it could be pushed. With a helicopter, not so forgiving...
More info on Kiev: The old Salyut-C and Kiev-88 medium format camera system was not created or sold as a knockoff or "replica" of the Hasselblad system. The body is admittedly a Soviet-era clone of the original Hasselblad 1000F, but with its own interchangeable body parts and lenses.
Also, the lenses were primarily made in a former Zeiss factory in Jena, DDR (East Germany). Some "CZJ" (Carl Zeiss Jena) have decent optical quality, while others are not. An old Shutterbug article jokingly stated that the amount of lens dust and quality control was dependent on the Vodka content of the workers that day. Over the years, I owned 1 Salyut-C and a couple of Kiev-88 bodies and lenses, and I can confirm that build quality was variable in my experience. Some US-based camera shops had a side business performing Kiev-88 CLA (cleaning, lubrication & adjustment).
This was for an Officially produced product with relatively few moving parts. So I cannot imagine the build quality for these counterfeit helicopters!
Many in the Bay Area may not realize that East Palo Alto (back when it was part of Menlo Park) was a hotbed of helicopter development and manufacture. 1940s/1950s
The Ka-26 is an old design that is long out of production in the official Russian factories. It turns out that while many more capable helicopters have been designed after it, the Ka-26 is ideal for one particular narrow job -- crop dusting.
The features that make ideal for this are unlikely to come up in another helicopter -- it is very small and yet it has twin coaxial rotors. Apparently the coaxial rotors combined with small size make it good for crop dusting because they spread out the downdraft and thus ensure that the helicopter does not destroy the plants it is supposed to be dusting.
As such it is unlikely to be replaced by a new helicopter. There are some new small helicopters being designed but none of them have twin rotors, because twin rotors are complex and it makes little sense to put them on a small cheap helicopter.Crop dusting itself is a relatively small market and it is unlikely to create sufficient demand for the design of a new helicopter.
Then how did the Ka-26 get its twin rotors? Well, for one the Kamov design bureau seems to really like twin rotors. Also, there may have been some Soviet military requirements that make them desirable -- such as being able to operate on city streets, being able to land on a truck, etc.
Furthermore, as these things go, crop dusting is relatively safe helicopter activity. There are no passengers, you have to do it in perfect weather anyways, even a slight wind will result in your pesticides being blown away, you do it at low altitude and over generally flat ground with few obstacles.
So while there is a problem with ignoring all safety regulations for helicopters, this is probably not that dangerous.
So, in general, this is a lot less crazy than it first appears. It seems like there was a small market demand for a niche application, but the demand was not sufficient to go through all the safety inspections or to use an existing Kamov factory. Yet the intended use is inherently much more safe than the usual helicopter mission so the clients were willing to take the risk.
A note about helicopter crop dusting that surprised me as an Iowa resident.
Around here almost all crop dusting is done by plane. I've seen one helicopter in the last ~10 years. The helicopter had an accompanying tank truck on a gravel road. The helicopter would land on top, refuel or refill the spray, then continue operating! I was very surprised to see it operating like this.
An airplane would have needed to fly 12 miles each way to the nearest airport. Quick look online says they commonly fly at ~180 mph, meaning ~8 minutes wasted round trip. I'm guessing the distance from the airport wasn't the major motivation behind the helicopter, but rather nearby power lines.
The biggest advantage of helicopter crop dusting when fixed-wing is an option is that the helicopter dusting gets more "into" the plants because the helicopter rotor actively blows the shit downwards.
Also useful for cherry crops: a rain at just the wrong time can ruin an entire crop.
There’s basically fleets of helicopters on standby around crop areas that are just there to fly above cherry trees and blow off the moisture if it rains late in the season at night.
Had a friend who worked for the US government, in one of their farmer support areas. Told me that it's not unusual for them to be used to keep crops from freezing, oddly enough.
So there was an....interesting, to say the least, situation in Poland just few weeks ago and that reason why it made the news - a small helicopter has landed at a local fuel station, the owner got out, pulled it to the pump by hand, refueled, and flew away. Apparently, according to the police, no law was actually broken in doing so - as long as the landing area was free and it was an emergency(the pilot was about to run out of fuel), it was all fine. According to the article that kind of helicopter is used for "herding cattle"(no idea why it would be needed in Poland though, our farms are never so large that you'd need a helicopter, but clearly I'm wrong).
Your comment reminded of this little YouTube gem of a Ka-26 crop duster doing aerobatics I stumbled over a little while ago. It's indeed a nice little machine :)
I was born in the village next to the bootleg factory. Heard about the factory a couple years ago when they were looking to hire mechanics. I couldn't believe they decided to open it illegally and found the whole story hilarious.
The story is still unfolding and the owner claims that the factory was in fact a research facility and no helicopters were sold. I don't believe that :)
The facility is located in the commune of Răculești, district Criuleni. It's a couple of kilometers away, but not in the disputed territory of Transnistria as falsely claimed in another comment. The owner and the factory workers on the hand, are residents of Transnistria. Why had they decided to open the factory on the "legal" side of the border - I have no idea. Transnistria is notorious for illicit activities including drugs and guns smuggling and would have been the perfect location for a bootleg factory.
Anyway, Moldovan Prosecutor's Office is known to take bribes and this "shut down" sounds like a deal gone wrong between prosecutor mafia and the factory owner.
There used to be ruins of an unfinished facility in that place, walked past it many times as a kid. Never imagined they would build helicopters in there.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI wonder how that would work in the US? I don't think there's anything illegal about building your own aircraft. That's basically what the EAA is all about I think.
https://www.eaa.org/eaa
* complete rules are extremely complex.
https://www.barnstormers.com/category-18671-Experimental.htm...
However, there are many commercial uses which experimental aircraft are not approved for. This mostly limits their practical utility to personal use (aka “fun”).
Was stalled on downwind turn, fell through electric wires, hung by last wire, communication cable, airplane came to full stop approx 10' off ground, rolled over on its back and dropped upside down on a clump of small scrub oak trees. No prop strike and no injury to pilot.
the realpolitik in this particular case probably goes deeper
"Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region."
that said, you might enjoy the topic of 'narco subs' which are illicit submarines manufactured to smuggle drugs (mostly from latin america to the US as I understand it)
They could get original parts (but through unofficial channels), have qualified personnel use official tools to assemble a helicopter, test it and sell it as real, but don’t get external confirmation that they used good parts and followed correct procedures.
Of course, without the external checks, it becomes easier to increase margins by getting second-hand parts, use unqualified personnel, don’t use official tools and do less quality testing.
1) Are these people barred from legitimately selling helicopters? Perhaps some sanctions?
2) Making a helicopter fly with the right engineering and control system is monumentally difficult - doesn't matter if its a knock off, assembled from parts or OEM.
3) Where did they get the skills and how did they acquire them? Did they have the capital to purchase a few originals and take them apart?
4) At this point, why not just sell them legitimately? Regulatory requirements prohibitive?
The good thing is I get a chuckle out of bootlegged products when an error can kill you.
I figured most people would say “no” to bootleg helicopters, heart valves, baby toys, but apparently I’m wrong. There is a market!
“illegally producing copies of Soviet-type Kamov KA-26 helicopters...”
For there must be demand. Otherwise all the planning, capital raising, investment, hiring, construction, accounting, etc. necessary for starting and operating this bootleg helicopter factory would have never been done in the fist place.
Who would want to buy bootleg helicopters? Is it developing countries seeking to save a bit of money by buying them in the black market? Or two-bit dictators who cannot buy helicopters through more, ahem, official channels due to trading sanctions? Assorted unsavory characters from the criminal underworld? Self-made entrepreneurs who want to get a good deal on a "genuine-looking" Soviet helicopter?
Surreal.
The buyer is not necessarily sitting in it, people have built submarines powered by humans to smuggle drugs after all.
I don't know anything about aircraft. However if I was to fly myself one I'd want to know enough about it to verify its safety independently. If I had the skill to verify the safety independently (effectively I'd have to be a pilot/helicopter mechanic), I wouldn't care all that much about the paperwork.
Boeing still has a market
This probably happens a lot everywhere with everything. It’s only a matter of time until a small town has a million dollar cloud services contract for their, you know, digital services and stuff (to backup files ... and stuff).
"Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region."
This isn't your normal one person aircraft smuggling operation
It's rather fascinating what the human mind can do with money + necessity. It's a reminder that great engineers can come from anywhere (and hopefully brought to work on nice-people things).
I don't suppose it will be long, if it hasn't happened already, before unmanned drones will be delivering most of the illicit cross-border shipments. You could cheaply build a fleet of them and overwhelm most coastal defenses.
There are a lot of things we think are out of the reach of individuals or small groups of people, but the fact is someone developed many of these technologies in more primitive times without access to modern materials or the internet. We live in an age where morons can make armed drones or cruise missles, or, apparently, counterfeit helicopters.
With scraps, in a cave!
My understanding is that building a reactor is fairly easy (possibly even in reach of a smart high-school kid). But that getting hold of the enriched uranium required to run a reactor is (thankfully) rather difficult due to trade and production being heavily controlled.
It's pretty cool. It's really cool.
Once you get enough U-235, just use beryllium to reflect the neutrons back in and add a moderator(water, graphite, etc). Just don't be anywhere near it when it finally goes critical.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
I remember in Hong Kong I'd be offered branded fake watches: a good fake Rolex from the excellent ABC company, not the cheap XYZ ones...
So you'd be approached on the street by a someone who looked sketchy and offered a Rolex for USD$100. They'd open a bag and let you look into it to see the Rolex while they made a big deal about checking to see that there were no cops around.
If you declined, they'd drop the price by half. Must have been effective because they did it for years.
https://www.amazon.com/Narco-Submarines-Covert-Shores-Recogn...
Got any proof of that? It looks more like you just being "creative"
Now, I started reading a bit into this. What I got so far is this: the authorities kept an eye on this operation for a few months. They arrested the main guys, who indeed reside on the other side of the river. These guys claim to be some sort of "inventors" who were simply experimenting with these helicopters and trying to overcome some technical obstacles. They say what they are doing on their property should not be anyone's business: they were indeed assembling helicopters, but did not sell yet anything. Given that, the authorities claim that the illegal things they did now include flying the helicopters for short periods of time without permission to fly, and bringing in the country various technical components without proper custom declarations (they had entire engines there, which they sourced from some engine manufacturers). If it comes to these types of arguments, the whole case does not appear so slam dunk.
The Transnistria angle, I'm not sure if there was one. There could be a faint one, in the fact that the prosecutors did not want to arrest some resident of Transistria without a watertight case, so that's why they waited for months. Now some people claim they messed up anyway.
Transnistria is basically following the same pattern as North Georgia or East Ukraine. Step 1 is a "separatists" group pops up overnight and declares independence. Step 2 is the totally legit "separatists" happen to do exactly the things Russia would do if they had annexed the place per se. Step 3 is Russia acknowledges the "independence" of the "breakaway" region and also denies being behind the separatists to begin with. Step 4 is Western leaders send strongly worded letters and symbolic sanctions. Step 5 is everyone forgets and the relationship status is set to "it's complicated".
This is how Russia invades without invading. The relevant term of art is "hybrid warfare".
However it should kept in mind all of these areas were part of Soviet Union, it is not unreasonable for pockets of broken up CIS states to want to split away, they could be ethnically Russian minority being oppressed and want to join Russia or be independent even., their problems may be genuine.
Why not?
Russia obviously used the opportunity, but the claim was not entirely without merit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria#Transnistria_War
I don't think you have made even the slightest effort to research the issue before regurgitating this stale bit of Russophobic propaganda.
You could start from wiki [0]:
In the 1980s ... in the Moldavian SSR in particular, there was a significant resurgence of pro-Romanian nationalism among ethnic Moldovans. The most prominent of these movements was the Popular Front of Moldova. In the spring of 1988, PFM demanded that the Soviet authorities declare Moldovan the only state language, return to the use of the Latin alphabet, and recognise the shared ethnic identity of Moldovans and Romanians. The more radical factions of the Popular Front espoused extreme anti-minority, ethnocentric and chauvinist positions, calling for minority populations, particularly the Slavs (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) and Gagauz, to leave or be expelled from Moldova.
On 31 August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the only official language with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldovan-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the official language, which served as the medium of interethnic communication, and by the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania, as well as the ethnocentric rhetoric of the Popular Front. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for equal status to be given to both Russian and Moldovan. Transnistria's ethnic and linguistic composition differed significantly from most of the rest of Moldova. The share of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians was especially high and an overall majority of the population, some of them ethnic Moldovans, spoke Russian as a mother tongue. Ethnic Moldovans accounted for less than 40% of Transnistria's population in 1989.
The nationalist Popular Front won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in the spring of 1990, and its agenda started slowly to be implemented. On 2 September 1990, the Pridnestrovian [Russian for Transnistrian] Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed as a Soviet republic by an ad hoc assembly, the Second Congress of the Peoples' Representatives of Transnistria. Violence escalated when in October 1990 the Popular Front called for volunteers to form armed militias to stop an autonomy referendum in Gagauzia, which had an even higher share of ethnic minorities. In response, volunteer militias were formed in Transnistria. In April 1990, nationalist mobs attacked ethnic Russian members of parliament, while the Moldovan police refused to intervene or restore order.
In the interest of preserving a unified Moldavian SSR within the USSR and preventing the situation escalating further, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, while citing the restriction of civil rights of ethnic minorities by Moldova as the cause of the dispute, declared the Transnistria proclamation to be lacking legal basis and annulled it by presidential decree on 22 December 1990.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria#Secession
When history involves territories changing owners, and Stalinist Russia was involved at some point, then things are always "complicated".
Press releases from the Moldovan government:
http://procuratura.md/md/newslst/1211/1/8368/
http://procuratura.md/md/newslst/1211/1/8371/
On the other hand, when I watch videos of boat building, it seems like it can be done by small shops with a few people. So maybe there is some equivalent tier of manufacturing for aircraft?
It would be extremely easy to build a WW2 era propeller plane, and people built oceangoing sailboats by themselves.
I found the story of this boat particularly interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cythera_(yacht)
this and Donbass are regions where reality is significantly distorted from our typical everyday reality. In particular, laundering helicopters (and the components for them like engines) through there wouldn't look as anything exceptional. It is strange that it was located on Moldova controlled territory though - while right on on the border with yet still not in Transnistria proper.
Update: According to the shop owner it were just full-scaled models which he's been using to develop his innovations, and he does have some patents for various equipment for helicopters - in Russian https://dumskaya.net/news/vladeletc-vertoletnogo-zavoda-pod-...
Reality either exists or not. It has no states. Hence can not be distorted.
One is a breakaway province that fought a civil war with its originating nation in 1992, with some amount of Russian involvement. In that time period, the Soviet Union was falling apart, and all sorts of regions were breaking off from their parent governments - a few of them through incredibly bloody conflicts between different ethnic groups.
The other is the site of a bit of an active shooting war between Russia and Ukraine, because Ukraine was leaning too far to the West, and Russia didn't want to lose its warm water port.
About the only thing that they have in common is that neither is recognized by the world (But neither is Taiwan), and that Russia was involved in various degrees...
If the government weren't such sad sacks of potatoes, they could maybe offer some help in setting up an actual legal production.
But nah, just arrest them and be done with it. Who cares, right?
Reminded me of the news about them seizing "hard drugs" from a "highly organized" group... Just some guys growing cannabis in their garden. They probably got 5-10 years, meanwhile there's bootleg "wine" (water+alcohol+sweetener, tastes absolutely horrible) in shops for nearly a decade and people drinking themselves to death.
article doesnt mention the city, does it? would be interesring to know if thats transnistria, in which case its pretty much russian and moldova has mostly nothing to do with it.
> Most of the people suspected of being involved in the production and assembly process, including the organisers and heads of the illegal operation, are residents of Moldova’s breakaway Transnistrian region.
The other question is, who in their right mind would buy such helicopters(if you can call them helicopters :D )? I wouldnt even get close to one...
Alternatively, these are capable copter builders with parts which have "fallen off the back of trucks" in Russia (or even an inside group stealing parts from the official factory).
The largest helicopter manufacturer in the world by volume is Robinson Helicopter, started by 1 dude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Helicopter_Company
HN: never stop saying stupid shit about aviation!
So my guess these are not "fake" helicopters but probably "real" Ka-26s, it was just an unlicensed production. Still impressive though.
>All the helicopters were produced without the necessary permits and documents of origin for the parts and equipment used.
In aerospace it's common to speak of certificates of conformance, which is a legal attestation from the manufacturer that the part is of genuine origin and complies with the specification from the aircraft's type design. The manufacturer is periodically audited/assessed for their quality control practices and parts are routinely tested to ensure they are airworthy.
The issue here, as per the above quote, is that they were probably using bootleg parts from random Chinese suppliers, which might be no big deal but might also have not been heat treated properly, for example, in order to save manufacturing cost.
If parts aren't compliant with the spec you can have structural failures in flight which is of course no bueno.
So yes, these are probably "real" Kamovs in the sense that they're probably built from real Kamov blueprints, but what many people outside the industry don't realize is that aerospace design and manufacturing encompasses much more than the blueprint. The whole program from the drawing board to the assembly line to the in-service maintenance work has to be a cohesive whole in order to produce an airworthy product.
I've heard rumors that parts past their time to live would ship to less rigorous countries. Likely a bunch of EOL parts in the mix too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut
But still have to cover very wide operational margins (they are overspecced) because many failures are catastrophic so they can't run on the edge of failing all the time.
FAA and certifications have improved safety a lot , most people however would still get on a unmodified 737 MAX if it was cheapest/only option available .
The turbomachinery is by far more simpler than high performance piston engines.
A car engine of 200kw only needs to give peak power for a few seconds of acceleration, and can be electronically safeguarded from outside of envelope operation.
An avia engine of 200kw needs to be able to operate on its full rated power continuously, for longer continuous periods of operation, be many times as reliable as a car engine, be lighter than a car engine, be engineered to accommodate, and survive failures, and be engineered free of governor mechanisms of any kind that may fail on take off (engine governor having to deliver demanded performance even if it has to waste the engine)
Is this not the case?
I believe in Helicopters you're often running at 90%+ max rated power, but on an engine that's derated from its true maximum power.
Most car engines are engineered for weight savings and efficiency instead of reliability. Not all.
It usually turns out there's some knowledge during assembly that is preserved by someone or something that's not in the documentation, that is insidiously hidden until you find out later it's gone wrong. And when someone tries to copy the process off of the pure documentation (or worse, just reverse engineering the thing with no documentation), that unwritten process is lost.
And then, you're going to get someone down the line who wonders, "what's this unnecessary part for?" and removes it or ignores when it's missing, and suddenly your rotors start flying apart after 100 hours or something.
At least when the knockoff Hasselblad (Kiev) cameras failed, it just led to a stuck film crank that could be reset, or when a Lada broke down it could be pushed. With a helicopter, not so forgiving...
Also, the lenses were primarily made in a former Zeiss factory in Jena, DDR (East Germany). Some "CZJ" (Carl Zeiss Jena) have decent optical quality, while others are not. An old Shutterbug article jokingly stated that the amount of lens dust and quality control was dependent on the Vodka content of the workers that day. Over the years, I owned 1 Salyut-C and a couple of Kiev-88 bodies and lenses, and I can confirm that build quality was variable in my experience. Some US-based camera shops had a side business performing Kiev-88 CLA (cleaning, lubrication & adjustment).
This was for an Officially produced product with relatively few moving parts. So I cannot imagine the build quality for these counterfeit helicopters!
Yet, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5IRykZsVBw
Kalashnikov "foreva"!
The features that make ideal for this are unlikely to come up in another helicopter -- it is very small and yet it has twin coaxial rotors. Apparently the coaxial rotors combined with small size make it good for crop dusting because they spread out the downdraft and thus ensure that the helicopter does not destroy the plants it is supposed to be dusting.
As such it is unlikely to be replaced by a new helicopter. There are some new small helicopters being designed but none of them have twin rotors, because twin rotors are complex and it makes little sense to put them on a small cheap helicopter.Crop dusting itself is a relatively small market and it is unlikely to create sufficient demand for the design of a new helicopter.
Then how did the Ka-26 get its twin rotors? Well, for one the Kamov design bureau seems to really like twin rotors. Also, there may have been some Soviet military requirements that make them desirable -- such as being able to operate on city streets, being able to land on a truck, etc.
Furthermore, as these things go, crop dusting is relatively safe helicopter activity. There are no passengers, you have to do it in perfect weather anyways, even a slight wind will result in your pesticides being blown away, you do it at low altitude and over generally flat ground with few obstacles.
So while there is a problem with ignoring all safety regulations for helicopters, this is probably not that dangerous.
So, in general, this is a lot less crazy than it first appears. It seems like there was a small market demand for a niche application, but the demand was not sufficient to go through all the safety inspections or to use an existing Kamov factory. Yet the intended use is inherently much more safe than the usual helicopter mission so the clients were willing to take the risk.
Around here almost all crop dusting is done by plane. I've seen one helicopter in the last ~10 years. The helicopter had an accompanying tank truck on a gravel road. The helicopter would land on top, refuel or refill the spray, then continue operating! I was very surprised to see it operating like this.
An airplane would have needed to fly 12 miles each way to the nearest airport. Quick look online says they commonly fly at ~180 mph, meaning ~8 minutes wasted round trip. I'm guessing the distance from the airport wasn't the major motivation behind the helicopter, but rather nearby power lines.
There’s basically fleets of helicopters on standby around crop areas that are just there to fly above cherry trees and blow off the moisture if it rains late in the season at night.
https://tvn24.pl/tvnwarszawa/okolice/warszawa-helikopter-wyl...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-126
There's no need for the complexity of 2 engines like in the 226.. But why not modernise to a turboshaft?
Are drones/uavs having any impact on crop dusting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPKCD8nC9w8
The facility is located in the commune of Răculești, district Criuleni. It's a couple of kilometers away, but not in the disputed territory of Transnistria as falsely claimed in another comment. The owner and the factory workers on the hand, are residents of Transnistria. Why had they decided to open the factory on the "legal" side of the border - I have no idea. Transnistria is notorious for illicit activities including drugs and guns smuggling and would have been the perfect location for a bootleg factory.
Anyway, Moldovan Prosecutor's Office is known to take bribes and this "shut down" sounds like a deal gone wrong between prosecutor mafia and the factory owner.
There used to be ruins of an unfinished facility in that place, walked past it many times as a kid. Never imagined they would build helicopters in there.