Mil was born to a
Russian Jewish family in
Irkutsk. His father was an employee of the
Trans-Siberian Railway, and his mother was a dentist. His grandfather was a
cantonist who had been drafted from Libava (today
Liepāja),
Latvia, and who settled in
Siberia after 25 years in the
Imperial Russian Navy. At age 12 Mil won the first prize in a model glider competition. In 1926 he entered the
Siberian Technological Institute in
Tomsk; however, since there was no curriculum for
aerospace engineering, he decided to transfer in 1928 to the
Don Polytechnical Institute in
Novocherkassk, where he was able to specialise in aviation. He married a fellow student, P.G. Rudenko, in 1932 and 4 daughters and a son followed. After graduating from the institute in 1931, Mil began his career at
TsAGI, too late to work under its original founder,
Nikolay Zhukovsky. He specialised in the design of
autogyros, and was an assistant to his future rival,
Nikolai Kamov. With the start of
World War II, Mil was drafted into the
Red Army and fought on the
Eastern Front in 1941 near
Yelnya. In 1943 he was called back to continue
research and development in improving the stability and control of combat aircraft. He completed his
dissertations ("Candidate", 1943,
PhD, 1945) and in 1947 headed the Helicopter Lab at TsAGI, which was later turned into the Moscow Helicopter Plant. Mil's creations won many domestic and international awards and set 69 world records. Most notably, the
Mil Mi-4 won a gold medal in the
Brussels International Exposition in 1958. In 1971, after his death, his
Mil Mi-12 (production name of V-12 prototype) won the
Sikorsky Prize as the most powerful helicopter in the world. Unlike his Soviet counterpart, Nikolai Kamov, Mil enjoyed great prestige due to his single-rotor helicopters, as Kamov used the co-axial rotor layout, which was more controversial. He died in 1970 in Moscow after a long illness and was buried in Yudinskoe Cemetery in the outskirts of Moscow. ==Awards and honors==