Apache. Ed Macy

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СКАЧАТЬ Goose Green during the Falklands War.

      Once my bust nose, dislocated jaw, three broken ribs and split testicle had healed, I fell in love with life as a paratrooper – surprising everyone, myself the most. After a couple of years and a six-month combat tour to Enniskillen fighting the IRA, I won promotion to lance corporal.

      But I was still an angry young man, and getting into too many fights. I never started them, but I always had to be the one to finish them. The red mist would descend and I could never back down. I even once flattened an RMP sergeant who wound me up on a train, and had to do fourteen days in the regimental nick.

      After promotion to full corporal and with the promise of sergeant’s stripes if I could keep out of trouble, I began to take my military career a little more seriously. I wanted to challenge myself at the highest level, so I began to prepare for SAS selection.

      Months of hard, self-imposed training followed, but my ambitions came to a sudden end one night in Aldershot during a gruelling bicycle ride in the pouring rain. I’d let half the air out of the tyres to make the pedalling twice as hard. A Volvo clipped my handlebars on a main road, sending me careering across the road and under the wheels of an old man’s oncoming car. My head hit the bumper and my feet peeled round and went through the windscreen, before the bloke drove over my right arm and shoulder. My heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

      In the days that followed, I learned the true meaning of pain. During one operation I was handcuffed to a bed and a vice-like clamp was strapped around my haemorrhaging kidneys for half an hour to squeeze the blood out of them.

      It was six months before I put on a uniform again and nine before I could run. I was no use to the Paras any more; my bust shoulder, spine, hips, knees and ankles could no longer bear any real weight. My front-line fighting career was at an end, and I was devastated. I had lost my purpose in life and was forced to abandon all my dreams of SAS selection. My gloom deepened as I contemplated my lack of a future – until a mate suggested the Army Air Corps. If I couldn’t fight on the front line, perhaps I could fly people to it instead. Perhaps I could even fly for the SAS.

      Then came a stroke of luck – my doctor lost all my medical records. Suddenly, and against all expectations, I stood a chance of passing the Army Air Corps’ stringent medical with my battered body.

      I was accepted, and came top of my class at flying school. I had to – it was my last chance. I loved flying and the freedom it gave me and I relished playing my part in battle formations. But I hated flying routine ass and trash flights, so whenever anything interesting came up, I went for it. It was always about the next challenge – it always has been.

      I got a place on a reconnaissance squadron, flying Gazelles. Five years later, I began to fly for the SAS, hunting down war criminals in the Balkans. The work was amazing, the most exciting I’d ever done.

      Something else happened in Bosnia. In late 2002, I met Emily. She was a nursing officer in the RAF. After a night out in the local town, I hitched a lift back to base in the back of the same Land Rover. In thick fog, the vehicle left the road, flipped and rolled down a bank into a muddy irrigation ditch. Emily was trapped in the back, under four feet of water. I pulled her out.

      I went to see her in hospital the next day. I was single again – I was the proud father of two children by two previous relationships, but neither had worked out. Emily was a pretty blonde Scot, and as sharp as she was funny. She was way out of my league and we both knew it. By the end of the week, I’d decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

      But Emily wasn’t convinced. At least she was honest with me.

      ‘Listen Ed, I don’t date full stop. If I did date, I certainly wouldn’t date a Pongo. And If I did date a Pongo you can bet your life I wouldn’t date a flyboy Pongo. So why don’t you quit with your pride intact?’

      ‘Aha – so that’s not a no …’

      It took some time, but eventually we became an item and have been together ever since. Emily’s forces background was both a good and a bad thing. It meant she knew the pressures of military life, and to expect long periods of separation. It also meant she knew the real risks of military flying, and the chances of me not coming home.

      The British Army’s much hyped attack helicopter programme had been in the pipeline for years. In 2002, it finally came online. Of course I had to be on it. It was the closest I could ever get to being in the front line again. I bent every rule in the book to make sure I was posted onto the very first Apache conversion course and Emily didn’t try to stop me. Before I got there, I read up everything I could about the amazing new machine.

      The Apache AH64A was initially designed by Boeing for the US government in the 1980s for the giant battlefields of the Cold War. The Pentagon wanted something to take out Soviet armour the moment it rolled across the West German border.

      Following the US military tradition of new aircraft honouring Indian tribes, the Apache was not just the next generation attack helicopter. It was the hunter-killer supreme for all future wars. Its surveillance capabilities far outstripped anything its predecessor the Bell AH1 ‘Huey’ Cobra had, and its destructive capability was without precedent.

      It looked very different to any previous attack helicopter too. The smooth aerodynamic curves and contours of the Sixties and Seventies were replaced with the hard angles and mean edges of the very first anti-radar – or stealth – technology.

      It was also larger: 49 ft 1 in. from the tip of its nose to the back of its tail, with its rotor blades reaching a further 8 ft. It stood 17 ft 6 in. tall and 16 ft 4 in. wide, and weighed 23,000 lb fully laden – 10.4 tonnes, or 140 fully grown men.

      Its angular shape wasn’t the Apache’s only stealth quality. It had four rotor blades rather than two, allowing it to turn at half the speed – five revolutions per second – and thus with half the noise to generate the same lift as the traditional two-bladed helicopters like the great thumping Hueys of the Vietnam War. Each blade’s high-tech design made the aircraft quieter still. Instead of hammering the air like the Chinook, Apache blades sliced through it, giving the gunship its trademark low-pitched growl.

      It also gave off the lowest heat signature of any helicopter built. Though the engine burned fuel at 800 degrees celsius, a powerful cooling system meant you wouldn’t even burn your hand if you pressed it against the exhaust. That seriously hindered a heat-seeking missile’s ability to track it. To mask more heat, its skin was coated with special paint that reflected less light too.

      When incoming fire did hit the Apache, its ingenious design meant it could withstand a remarkable amount of it – including a 23-mm high explosive round. A US Apache in Iraq even once took a direct hit from a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, shredding its starboard engine and wing and leaving its rotor blades in tatters. It still managed to return fire, kill its attackers and make it back to base.

      What went on inside the aircraft was cleverer still. Thirteen kilometres of electric wiring linked the avionics, engines, visual aids and weapons systems run by a myriad of on-board computers which monitored every tiny electronic pulse.

      Most impressive of all the Apache’s cutting edge technology was how it found its prey. Its Target Acquisition and Designation Sight system was made up of an array of cameras housed in a double-headed nose cone that looked like a pair of giant insect eyes. Its 127-times-magnification day TV camera could read a car number plate 4.2 kilometres away. At night, the thermal camera was so powerful it could identify a human form from a distance of four kilometres, and spots of blood on the ground from a kilometre up.

      Then СКАЧАТЬ