>The people responsible for launching the missile are immediately jubilant when the missile scores a hit but are quite disheartened when the Russian chopper fails to explode, fall out of the air, go on fire or pretty much do anything else but keep flying.
Mi-8 > Allah.
Yeah, the Russians may have major mission-killing problems with all sorts of platforms or weapons systems, but their helicopters sure don’t seem to be one of them. The amount of punishment that the big Russian choppers can take and still fly is ludicrous.
US military helicopter development may have missed a trick or two somewhere along the way. There are quite a few historic battles that would have turned out better if the helicopters bringing troops to a battlefield could have flown in unsupported/unescorted, disgorged their troops and then instead of getting out of the battle area, stayed in the area to directly support the infantry and begun hunting enemy troops in the area with their heavy firepower and armored bellies. Vietnam might have gone considerably differently if our troops had been deployed from our version of the Hind behemoths, then had them stick around to hunt instead of having to fly away to avoid being shot up. Same thing for dustoff/medevac; something that can land and load troops that doesn’t have to care about enemy rifle or machine gun fire sounds like a great idea to me.