Moldova Shuts Down Bootleg Helicopter Factory
balkaninsight.com
balkaninsight.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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...
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).
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.
* 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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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)
Yet, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5IRykZsVBw
Kalashnikov "foreva"!
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.
This isn't your normal one person aircraft smuggling operation
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.
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."