Hellfire. Ed Macy

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       ONE ON ONE

      From 1998 onwards, I decided I’d amass so much indispensable knowledge about attack helicopters that the Army Air Corps would have no choice but to select me for the Apache when it eventually entered service. I began by reading up everything on attack helicopters I could find. The next part of the strategy was to get myself on an Air Combat Tactics Instructor’s (ACTI) course.

      A helicopter, by its very nature, is a vulnerable machine. Unlike a combat aircraft, it cannot rely on speed to get it out of trouble over the battlefield. The policy of the British Army, which did not own a dedicated attack helicopter force, was for its pilots to avoid trouble if they possibly could. This entailed remaining covert-flying down in the weeds-or remaining at ‘stand-off’ engagement ranges: attacking tanks outside the range of their offensive weaponry.

      But with the Apache it would be different. The Apache had started life as part of a very exclusive club. Before the Berlin Wall fell, there were precious few attack helicopters in existence. The Soviets had developed a fearsome machine called the Mil Mi-24 Hind and the Americans had developed the Apache and the Cobra. There were other attack helicopters on the drawing board or in development when the Wall fell, but these three were the only ones that mattered.

      With their enormous defence budget, the Americans bought the Cobra and the Apache in large quantities. Other less prosperous NATO nations had opted instead for machines like the Lynx, the Gazelle and the German BO105.

      The first Gulf War brought things into sharp focus. The utility of the Americans’ Apaches quickly became self-evident. In the aftermath of the conflict, NATO nations began to accelerate their attack helicopter plans and numerous competitions were launched across Europe to determine the best machine for the job. The Apache began to find itself in contention with the Eurocopter Tiger and new developments of the Cobra. But it had been massively updated, too, from the ‘A’ model that first entered service with the US Army in the 1980s, to the ‘D’ model, which was equipped with the new Longbow radar system.

      These machines had an unbelievable level of sophistication that enabled them to fly over the battlefield, not around it, looking for ‘trade’.

      I realised that one of the keys to being selected as an Apache pilot was simply getting to grips with that sophistication. It would force the Army Air Corps into a brave new world of Air Combat Tactics it had never properly had to confront before-not en masse, at least-because pilots of its premier anti-tank helicopter, the Lynx, were taught to avoid battlefield threats, not go hunting for them.

      In early 1998, I went to see my OC and persuaded him that we needed an ACTI course at Wattisham, with me and a few other 3 Regiment pilots as its principal pupils. The OC knew as well as I did that the Army Air Corps had some skeleton procedures for fighting and surviving over the battlefield, but no means of teaching it.

      ‘Fine, Staff,’ he told me, ‘but it you want it, you’re going to have to go out there and find it.’

      Fortunately, I knew where to look.

      The RAF had a Helicopter Tactics course, but the crabs were into a largely different game-ferrying quantities of men and materiel around the battlefield. I was more interested in air combat.

      The Royal Marine pilots of 3 Brigade Air Squadron-3BAS-practised ACT and told me the only way to get a course would be to ask the Senior Flying Instructors’ department. Like Aviation Standards-Chopper Palmer’s lot-what these guys didn’t know didn’t yet exist, but where Aviation Standards tested, the SFIs taught.

      I’d flown with nearly all of them at some point, all over the world, so I asked whether they would be able to help us out. The short answer was yes.

      Our Regimental Qualified Helicopter Instructor selected a handful of pilots-based on the number of flying hours they’d amassed, their standard of flying, their qualifications and a few other factors-and we had our course. The Army Air Corps formally entered the air combat instruction business for the first time.

      Our biggest gun-based threat on the battlefield was the Soviet-designed ZSU-23/4, a fearsome radar-guided, turreted beast with four 23 mm cannon barrels, each capable of directing thousands of rounds of ammunition per minute with pinpoint accuracy at low-flying airborne threats. It looked like a tank with a barstool stuck out of the turret. Even a heavily armoured helicopter like the Apache would be unlikely to survive a direct hit by the ZSU-23/4; a Gazelle or a Lynx would be blown to smithereens.

      If your helicopter was lucky enough to be equipped with a radar warning receiver, which some of ours were, it told you certain essential pieces of information about battlefield ‘emitters’: not only what kinds of radar threat were out there, but their distance, bearing and ‘mode’ (whether they were merely scanning for threats or, more seriously, tracking targets or, worst of all, launching missiles at you).

      If your Radar Warning Receiver (RWR) told you you’d been ‘locked-up’ by a ZSU-23/4, there was only one possible means of survival: diving for the deck in an attempt to put something hard between you and the smoking barstool.

      This was chilling enough, but with a radar-guided missile launch-be it from the ground or air-it was even worse. Few British СКАЧАТЬ