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.
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.
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.
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).
The quick explanation for some of the questions I've seen on this story:
1. what is the purpose of building an aircraft that you cannot register? Cigarettes contraband, they fly low in mountain regions between Ukraine and Romania to smuggle cigarettes that are a lot cheaper in Ukraine because in EU taxes are up to 80-90% of the price. We had one of these helicopters crashed last year just doing this.
2. How do they know how to build it? It is not the latest high end technology and there are lots of people that used to work in aviation factories in the region; Ukraine, Romania, Serbia had aircraft factories with thousands of employees. Also the people in the trade of maintaining these helicopters (registered mechanics) have the knowledge and most of the tools needed to assembly it. It is a small, light helicopter, we had one built (legally) in our small hangar by 2 people in their free time.
3. Why don't they sell them legally? Because if you are in the business of selling helicopters to people doing contraband, you don't want to attract any attention, you want to operate under the radar. It is more profitable to sell these to smugglers than to the official market, otherwise the original manufacturing plant would still be selling these with better efficiency of scale.
4. How hard is to do it? In the Transnistria region, it's easy, it's almost lawless. In other places, it's fairly easy to set up such a shop in a lesser populated area if you have a small crew that you can trust. You can eventually have some semi-legit business or repairing agricultural equipment in case anyone sees you carrying stuff around and asks what is that: "tractor spare parts". Police in this area is corrupt, sometimes they are part of the operation providing cover and protecting from investigations, it's just a matter of money changing the right hands.
>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...
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).
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'll be honest, this is bad that it's illegal and ofc uncontrolled helicopter building is really dangerous. But damn as a Moldovian I feel so proud that we're actually building something xD
There's a lot of enterprising people trying to build stuff, sadly it's simply easier to do it in the other Moldova - and if you go there, why not go all the way to western Europe, more funding there :/
Solar panel/battery companies seem to be popular, they assemble a lot of things on the spot. Having access only to the internal market is a big limiting factor imo.
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
[+] [-] hristov|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DavidPeiffer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flohofwoe|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPKCD8nC9w8
[+] [-] lazylizard|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
Are drones/uavs having any impact on crop dusting?
[+] [-] plextoria|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] plextoria|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duemti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbital-decay|5 years ago|reply
So my guess these are not "fake" helicopters but probably "real" Ka-26s, it was just an unlicensed production. Still impressive though.
[+] [-] na85|5 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] W-Stool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yingw787|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] AdrianB1|5 years ago|reply
1. what is the purpose of building an aircraft that you cannot register? Cigarettes contraband, they fly low in mountain regions between Ukraine and Romania to smuggle cigarettes that are a lot cheaper in Ukraine because in EU taxes are up to 80-90% of the price. We had one of these helicopters crashed last year just doing this.
2. How do they know how to build it? It is not the latest high end technology and there are lots of people that used to work in aviation factories in the region; Ukraine, Romania, Serbia had aircraft factories with thousands of employees. Also the people in the trade of maintaining these helicopters (registered mechanics) have the knowledge and most of the tools needed to assembly it. It is a small, light helicopter, we had one built (legally) in our small hangar by 2 people in their free time.
3. Why don't they sell them legally? Because if you are in the business of selling helicopters to people doing contraband, you don't want to attract any attention, you want to operate under the radar. It is more profitable to sell these to smugglers than to the official market, otherwise the original manufacturing plant would still be selling these with better efficiency of scale.
4. How hard is to do it? In the Transnistria region, it's easy, it's almost lawless. In other places, it's fairly easy to set up such a shop in a lesser populated area if you have a small crew that you can trust. You can eventually have some semi-legit business or repairing agricultural equipment in case anyone sees you carrying stuff around and asks what is that: "tractor spare parts". Police in this area is corrupt, sometimes they are part of the operation providing cover and protecting from investigations, it's just a matter of money changing the right hands.
[+] [-] trhway|5 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] vkou|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] throw1234651234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|5 years ago|reply
Reality either exists or not. It has no states. Hence can not be distorted.
[+] [-] AndrewZM|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] netsharc|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] agnokapathetic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burger_moon|5 years ago|reply
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.
https://www.eaa.org/eaa
[+] [-] rumanator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlb|5 years ago|reply
* complete rules are extremely complex.
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cat199|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Someone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticninja|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] razvvan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp-dude-87844|5 years ago|reply
Press releases from the Moldovan government:
http://procuratura.md/md/newslst/1211/1/8368/
http://procuratura.md/md/newslst/1211/1/8371/
[+] [-] FpUser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vuln|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amoitnga|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nneonneo|5 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] AndrewZM|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] c-smile|5 years ago|reply
Yet, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5IRykZsVBw
Kalashnikov "foreva"!
[+] [-] m0zg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smabie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yxhuvud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] costea123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|5 years ago|reply
Solar panel/battery companies seem to be popular, they assemble a lot of things on the spot. Having access only to the internal market is a big limiting factor imo.
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply