So you want to fly a helicopter in a war zone ?

[Ninurta]

In not to many more years when an army/Air Force face an equally well equipped 1st class military, doctrine will have to change as causalities will be horrendous  IMO

Judging by the smoke trail of the missile, that looked more like a lateral hit than a frontal one.

Mi-24's is why we started smuggling Stingers into Afghanistan back in the day. The Hinds were flying NOE, and were a holy terror. You'd just be sitting there on a reverse slope, minding your own business - which usually involved either killing Russians or doing recon preparatory to killing Russians - and one would just pop up over the ridge and start lighting stuff up. If you saw one, you always knew that at least 3 more were hiding behind other ridges, getting ready to light stuff up, because they always flew in flights of at least 4.

So we smuggled those Stingers in through the area around the Khyber Pass.

Proof of concept was at Jalalabad. There was a Hind base there, and one fine day a flight of 6 took off from it, heading south into the mountains that surrounded the infamous Tora Bora, Unbeknownst to them, there was a team set up just waiting for that to happen, armed with smuggled Stingers. 5 Hinds were dropped in their own rotor wash that day, leaving one to get back to base to report the action.

After that proof of concept, Stingers were lighting up Hinds everywhere, and that forced them to abandon NOE flight and head to higher air, which made them less effective for fire support. You see, the Mi-24 Hind has also been called a "flying tank", loaded down with rockets and carrying a 12.5mm gun mounted under the nose. Forcing them to increase altitude made their weapons less accurate, and save muj lives so that they could live to fight another day.

So it's good to see Ukrainians carrying on that tradition!

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