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In the year 1972. Soviet design bureau Mil embarked on an ambitious journey.

The goal – tiltrotor aircraft to replace the Mi8 in the future.

Experienced with their own work on Mi V12 and inspired by Kamov designs, the idea was pretty straightforward, but as we know today with aviation projects – idea is often not enough.

Let’s go see why the Soviet Osprey never took to the skies.
Ever since WW2, this one concept has been very intriguing for the engineers on the both sides of the Iron curtain.

That is – building a very fast helicopter, or a VTOL transport airplane.

And you know it that the Nazis actually tried this first, but it’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, the British built their famous Fairey Rotodyne and the Soviet Kamov bureau built Ka22, but the Americans had a different concept.

Unlike the – 2 pair of engines for vertical and horizontal movement – concept that the British and the Soviets explored, Bell created a tiltrotor aircraft called the XV3 in 1955.

Jump forward a bit and we’re in the 70s and this is where Mil’s story starts.
After their attempts with the gyrodyne and hybrid helicopter concepts like the Mi V12, the Soviet spies went over to Bell for let’s say “inspiration” for this new project.

This time their transport helicopter project would base its design on the tilt rotor engines.

How does this work?

Well to put it simply, during the take off, engines would be tilted upwards and the aircraft would be controlled similar to a tandem rotor helicopter, after gaining altitude, engines would rotate into a horizontal position and the aircraft would be able to have transport airplane performance in terms of speed.

For example, Mi8 would fly at around 220km/h with maximum speed at 250km/h and Mi30s projected top speed was somewhere between 500 and 600km/h.

To put this even more into perspective, V22 Osprey’s top speed stands at 509 km/h, and Ka22, the previous Soviet gyrodyne project, achieved the class record speed of 356km/h so now you can understand why this tiltrotor concept was so interesting.

With the main idea behind the concept ready, Mil bureau got the TsAGI, the Central aerohydro dynamic institute behind them and started working on the project.

As we previously mentioned, the goal of this project was to replace the Mi8.

But the greed and unrealistic requirements would prove to be a roadblock on this project very soon.