The Soviet women helicopter pilots who shattered records in a Hind
In September of last year, I had the opportunity to fly a Mil Mi-24D attack helicopter for a story that has now been published in the winter issue of Vertical 911 magazine.
Getting to fly a Hind — the NATO reporting name for the Mi-24 — is a rare privilege for any helicopter pilot, but particularly for those of us in Western countries, where Soviet military hardware is hard to come by.
Famously, even Hollywood had to resort to a dressed-up Aérospatiale Puma helicopter to play the role of a Hind in the Rambo movies. (Although there were Hinds in the U.S. during the ’80s, they were operated by the Army as part of a classified exploitation program — and the Army didn’t exactly order them from the factory.)
Hinds are still exceptionally rare in the U.S., but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it no longer takes a Night Stalkers raid to acquire one. The Hind I flew is one of three former Bulgarian Air Force Mi-24Ds that belong to a private owner in Texas, who has restored two of them to flying condition. These Hinds are used for air shows, for adversary orientation training for the U.S. military, and also for a bit of recreational flying, because what’s more enjoyable on a Sunday afternoon than taking your Russian gunship out for a spin?
In researching the history of the Mi-24, I was delighted to learn that in 1975, two Soviet women, Galina Rastorgueva and Ludmila Polyanskaya, used a modified Mi-24 to shatter several helicopter speed records, including two previously held by men.
The Hind was certainly the right tool for the job. The aircraft’s anhedral, cantilever wings provide approximately 25 percent of the lift in forward flight, enabling dash speeds of up to 181 knots (208 miles per hour) — which is crazy fast for a helicopter. By comparison, the SA 330 Puma has a never-exceed speed of 147 knots (169 mph). When, after flying the real thing, I went back and watched clips of a Puma playing the role of a Hind in Rambo: First Blood II, it looked like a lumbering hippo disguised as a racehorse.
Galina Rastorgueva was the daughter of legendary Soviet test pilot Viktor Rastorguev, who was killed in 1945 during a test flight of an experimental Yak-3RD fighter plane with a liquid-fuel rocket engine. Rastorgueva, who was nine years old at the time of her father’s crash, did not sour on aviation as a result of it; she began flying through an aero club as a teenager. She excelled in her studies at the Moscow Aviation Institute and, later, at a flying school in Kremenchuk. However, as a woman, it took her years of persistence to gain the opportunity to qualify as a test pilot.
Little has been written about Rastorgueva for Western audiences. A notable exception is an article by Mary Lou Neale in the July 1991 issue of Ninety-Nine News, after Rastorgueva and Polyanskaya were honored by and made members of The Ninety-Nines International Organization of Women Pilots. (Mary Lou Neale, who worked as a newspaper writer before becoming a Women Air Force Service Pilot, or WASP, was a pretty notable person herself.)
“When I read in their letter that the official Soviet comment on Galina Rastorgueva and Ludmila Polyanskaya’s record-breaking flight was, ‘They fly like men,’ there was instant kinship,” Neale wrote:
The way to success in aviation is still uneven if not often downright rough — and far more so in Russia. The military is not open to women, in spite of the recognized heroism of the WWII female fighter and bomber pilots. The women told that, “After victory, it was, ‘Go home now. The kitchen awaits.’” As before WWII, the only way to learn to fly was through a flying club which was often beyond the means of the average woman. If one did succeed by doing this, in Galina’s words, “The responsibility was great. If one woman pilot happens to make a mistake, it is like a heavy stone which will pull down the rest of them. In aviation, women have no right to make mistakes.”
Yeah, that still sounds familiar.
According to Neale’s article, Polyanskaya had grown up fascinated by aviation and joined an aero club where she parachuted, flew gliders, and learned topography. Her performance gained her admission to a flying school in Ulyanovsk, where she caught the attention of Rastorgueva, who had been cleared for a record attempt and was looking for a navigator.
Ready for their projected trial, both women understood that record flights were “not exotic, but all-absorbing work. We put our whole souls and skill into each flight. The results were much better than expected, satisfying Marat Tishchenko, the designer of this helicopter. We economized, doing everything ourselves. We insisted on being given all flights, all testing. We gave exhaustive answers to all possible questions from the plant test pilots. Each flight was a very difficult examination for the crew and the machine.”
Their hard work paid off. As Neale reported, on July 16, 1975, they set the speed record for women of 341.32 kilometers per hour over distances of 15 to 45 kilometers. Two days later, over a 100-km course, they flew at a speed of 334.023 km/h. A month later, they set an all-time high on a 500-km triangular route at 331.623 km/h, shattering the men’s record of 273.507. Twelve days later, they set another absolute record on a 1,000-km triangular route with a speed of 322.646 km/h, besting the previous men’s record of 258.66.
As Neale observed:
That was the first time in the history of aviation that women established a helicopter record and it was done during the International Women’s Year. The helicopter was the Mi-24, the newest at that time, and the women fell in love with it. They wrote, “Now there were three of us, rather than two, because it seemed to us that our helicopter also had a soul. It sure had character because a 4,500-horsepower helicopter commanded respect. It was as if our dream came true. We appreciated its perfect flying characteristics immediately after the first flight.”
Helicopter engineering has made a lot of progress over the past 43 years, including in the Mi-24 series. I wouldn’t describe the flying characteristics of the ’70s-era Mi-24D as “perfect,” as the anhedral wings that make it so fast also seriously limit its maneuverability. Rolling into a turn, the wings tend to continue the banking action and must be counteracted with lateral cyclic; beyond a certain angle of bank, that cyclic authority simply runs out. The D model’s low-pressure hydraulics impose further constraints on maneuverability (a shortcoming that has been remedied in the latest Mi-24 models).
Not that I cared too much about this myself. Even wrestling with the less-than-ergonomic flight controls in the co-pilot/gunner (CPG) compartment — which are normally stowed to allow the CPG to focus on weapons — I was as thrilled to be flying the Hind as Rastorgueva and Polyanskaya had been. As my instructor pilot, John Totty, observed, it’s impossible to look at a Hind without feeling a little bit of awe. Finding yourself at the controls of one is, if not like a dream, then at least like a Rambo movie come true.
For many people around the world, the associations evoked by the Hind are sinister ones, and for good reason. I’m happy that this remarkable machine was also connected with a more positive series of flights, and a tremendously empowering achievement for women in aviation.
