Mil Mi-26
The Halo
“The heaviest helicopter ever to enter production.”
Mil · helicopter
The Mi-26 is what you build when the cargo won't fit in any other helicopter: an eight-blade main rotor 105 feet across, two 11,400-shp turboshafts, and a cabin that swallows 20 tonnes. It has hauled a 23-tonne block of Siberian permafrost with a woolly mammoth frozen inside, and once lifted a damaged CH-47 Chinook — a heavy-lift helicopter — as cargo.
An Mi-26 holds the world record for the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 meters: 56,768.8 kg — more than the empty weight of a Boeing 737.
Count the blades: eight on the main rotor, more than any other production helicopter. The fuselage is airliner-sized with fixed landing gear.
One might be overhead right now.
Bogey turns the The Halo from a dot in the sky into a card in your logbook.
