Kazan Helicopters in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia has been one of the main Russian manufacturers of helicopters of the Mikhail Mil bureau design. In the 1990s management realized that there would be a need for light helicopters in Russia, as the fleet of standard Mi-2s was getting older, and the design itself became obsolete. The Mi-2 was the lightest helicopter in large-scale use in the former USSR, despite being larger than most light Western helicopters. At first Kazan Helicopters wanted to develop a helicopter based on the AS 350 Ecureuil in cooperation with Eurocopter, but it failed. As a result, in 1993 Kazan Helicopters organized its own design bureau in order to create a new helicopter (the bureau was officially certified by the Russian authorities in January 1997, designer Valery Dvoeglazov). The helicopter was named "Ansat" (meaning "light", "simple" or "easy" in the Tatar language).