By Randy Law, SMF museum curator
(Flight Deck Podcast Transcript)
The Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopter is one of the stars of the Southern Museum of Flight’s collection. It’s pretty cool on its own, but even better is the story behind ours and how we acquired it.
The Mi-24. A brief history
The Mi-24 was introduced by the Soviet Union in 1972, that is, in the middle of the Cold War. It was developed after the Soviets studied the American use of helicopters in Vietnam. Whereas the United States built several different helicopters to play different roles, the Soviets combined multiple functions in one platform. The Mi-24 was designed as a heavy ground attack helicopter, a troop carrier, and an anti-helicopter gunship. The Soviets ended up building over 2500 of them, many of which were exported. The Mi-24 became known as the Hind because that’s its NATO reporting name — all NATO names for Soviet helicopters start with the letter H.
The Hind was faster and could climb more quickly than its clearest American gunship counterpart, the Cobra, but in a lot of ways it came up short. It was far less maneuverable, harder to control, had poorer navigation equipment, almost no night-fighting capability, and it had a nasty propensity for catastrophic tail boom strikes (in which a main rotor actually hits the fuselage between the cabin and the tail) under extreme maneuvering conditions.
Onboard weaponry. Appearance.
All that said, the Mi-24 was a beast. The standard version was equipped with a four-barreled, 12.7mm machine gun in the nose and each stubby wing had three hardpoints that could mount a combination of anti-tank missiles, air-to-surface rocket pods, and bombs. It was outfitted with heavy armor around the crew and engine so that it could take a lot of groundfire and keep on flying. With good reason, Soviet and later Russian crews called it the Flying Tank.
The Mi-24 has a very distinctive look. It has two glass canopies mounted one in front of the other (rear for pilot, front for weapons officer), plus double air intakes in the front with huge exhaust ducts on either side near the top. When viewed from the front, the Hind looks like a sleek, prehistoric creature. That’s why Soviet and Russian crews also have called it the Crocodile.
Deployment and combat history
The Soviets deployed the Hind to its forward units in Eastern Europe, where it would have been used if the Cold War turned hot and NATO and the Warsaw Pact found themselves shooting at each other. Thankfully that never happened. But the Hind still got plenty of combat experience, in part because the Soviets sold or gave hundreds of Hinds — technically called the Mi-25 in its export variant — to its allies around the world. Because of this, the Hind flew in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. And it saw action in several of these places, including Ethiopia, the Iran-Iraq War, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua.
But its most famous combat experience came in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union invaded the country on Christmas Day, 1979, to prop up a communist revolution that had taken place there the previous year. Before long, a resistance movement emerged. The anti-communist forces became known as the mujahideen, and they spent a decade fighting against the Afghan government and the Soviets backing them.
Now remember, this was the Cold War, so the United States quickly jumped in to start supporting the mujahideen with weapons and training as a way to undermine the Soviet Union, particularly after the Soviets had provided so much support to North Vietnam a decade earlier. This is all backstory to the rise of the Taliban, their relationship with al-Qaeda, the US invasion after 9/11, and America’s twenty-year long war there … but that’s another story.
In Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Hind was a real workhorse.
The Soviets used it to transport small detachments of troops, but its main use was as a ground attack platform. Since so much of the fighting in the Soviet-Afghan War was in remote, mountainous, inhospitable areas, the Soviets depended on the Hind to provide support for its troops. The Afghan mujahideen came to really fear the Hind’s ability to lay down a withering fire — so much so that the Afghans nicknamed it Satan’s Chariot. The mujahideen had some first-generation shoulder-launched missiles, like the Soviet Strela and the American Redeye, but these were pretty ineffective. Things only started to change when the United States began to give Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in 1986. Stingers were highly lethal, highly accurate, lightweight, fire-and-forget shoulder-launched missiles — a cutting-edge technology that was the perfect antidote to the Hind.
That’s a quick overview of the Hind. But it’s only half the story, because now we’re going to discuss our Hind at the Southern Museum of Flight. It’s an honest to goodness history-maker.
How we acquired our Mi-24
Let’s be clear — our Hind never flew in Afghanistan. It was instead operated by — get this — Libya under Col. Gaddafy, who was given several Hinds by the Soviets. The Libyans, in turn, used their Hinds in a short border war against their central African neighbor Chad in 1987. Libya had an overwhelming advantage in troops and firepower, but Chad won the war, in large part because it made great use of very mobile Toyota trucks equipped with machine guns and rockets. These came to be known as “technicals” and have since been used all over the world. It’s also why the war came to be called the Toyota War.
In any case, when Libya was defeated, it quickly fled the region — leaving behind a treasure trove of weapons, including a couple of Hinds. As mentioned earlier, these were technically Mi-25s — the export variant of the Mi-24 Hind — but they were Hinds in everything but name. The United States had been trying to get its hands on one for years so that it could closely study its capabilities and discover its weaknesses.
So the US struck a deal with Chad to take one. The catch was that the Hind was still at a remote air base in the northern part of the country. And the fear was that if the Libyans knew the US was coming for the helicopter, they would swoop in and destroy it. Therefore in June 1988 the US mounted a stealth operation to whisk it away. The operation was called Mount Hope III, and it was carried out by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the so-called Night Stalkers. They used a MH-47 Chinook to carry the Hind away from the old Libyan air base, and then loaded it on to a C-5 Galaxy at the Chadian capital.
Libya’s Mi-24 studied in Alabama
Back in the States, the Hind eventually made its way to Fort Rucker — now Fort Novosel — in southeastern Alabama. It went there because that’s the primary training facility for US Army aviators, that is, most of the military’s helicopter pilots. There the Army completely refurbished the Hind, studied it inside and out, and learned to fly it. The US Army used it in training exercises, yes, but it also used it … drum roll … to refine the operation of the US shoulder-launched Stinger missile … which, as you’ll remember, was being used by the mujahideen in Afghanistan to bring down Soviet Hinds there.
How successful was the Stinger against the Hind?
Good numbers are hard to come by, but according to some sources the mujahideen used Stingers to bring down between 250 and 300 Soviet aircraft, most of which were helicopters, and most of those were Hinds. Even more impressive was the kill ratio — some sources claim that roughly 75% of the Stingers fired brought down an aircraft. Now probably most of those Hinds had already been shot down before the mujahideen got their hands on Stingers that were updated with information from our Museum’s helicopter. And by the late 1980s the Soviets were using the Hinds in different ways to counteract the Afghans’ use of Stingers. But it’s a good bet that the Southern Museum of Flight’s Mi-24 probably helped shoot down a few Soviet Hinds before the USSR fully withdrew in 1989.
The Mi-24 today
The Hind is still used by Russia, although it’s been supplanted by several newer, more specialized helicopters. It’s also in use around the world in dozens of countries that the Russians gave, or sold, it to. It is worth noting that both the Russians and the Ukrainians are using them in the current Russo-Ukraine War
As far as we know, there are only four Hinds on display in the United States. But given the story associated with it, ours is definitely unique. Come check it out at the Southern Museum of Flight here in Birmingham, Alabama. It is worth seeing up close and personal. Stay tuned for more stories from the Southern Museum of Flight!
Learn More About The Mi-24
The Cobra and the Mongoose: the Legacy Of The Mi-24 and the Stinger Missile in The Soviet-Afghan War