Apache

by Ed Macy

The devastation they then wrought at Mutla Ridge reset the height of the bar. A fleet of Apaches – backed up by A10s – destroyed hundreds of Iraqi military vehicles fleeing Kuwait on the Basra road. The endless line of twisted and smouldering metal was nicknamed the Highway of Death. Their final tally for the war was 278 tanks, 180 artillery pieces and 500 Armoured Personnel Carriers.

  In 1998, the AH64D came into service. It was even deadlier; 400 per cent more lethal (hitting more targets) and 720 per cent more survivable than its predecessor. The most significant addition was the state of the art Longbow Radar which could operate in all weathers, day or night, simultaneously detect 1,024 potential targets, moving or static, up to eight kilometres away, classify the top 256 and display the sixteen most threatening for destruction – all in three seconds. Twenty-five seconds later, every one of those targets could be destroyed by a single Apache’s Hellfires. A squadron of eight AH64Ds working in unison could terminate 128 tanks in twenty-eight seconds – just by raising one Apache Longbow Radar above the tree or ridge line for a few seconds. They christened it ‘Fire and Forget’.

  Gradually, the US allowed its closest allies to purchase the Apache. Israel were the first, followed by the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Egypt, Greece, Japan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. In the late 1990s, the British government finally decided it needed them too. As a nation, we didn’t have an attack helicopter capability, just a few Lynx squadrons armed with a couple of TOW anti-tank missiles strapped onto the side of each craft.

  Despite its cutting edge design and astonishingly powerful Longbow, the AH64D still had a few ongoing shortcomings. They couldn’t operate off ships, and they weren’t powerful enough to carry a significant amount of ammunition and fuel at the same time. To fly them at low level meant heavy anti-aircraft fire could still bring them down.

  Our generals approached the government with an ambitious plan. Why didn’t we buy Boeing’s Apache shell, keep the good bits and make the rest even better ourselves? The boffins at Westland Helicopters went to work.

  The most important change was two Rolls Royce RTM 322 engines. Each churned out more than twice the brake horsepower of a Formula One racing car, giving our model 30 per cent more power than the American AH64D. It allowed us to fly further, higher and fight with more weapons.

  The Brits also scoured the globe for the best countermeasures and built them into the world’s most sophisticated defensive aide suite. It allowed pilots to take the aircraft above small arms range, which downed 95 per cent of all military helicopters, and into the previously lethal SAM belt – because the British Apache could now defeat surface-to-air missiles.

  They also added a folding blade mechanism so we could operate off aircraft carriers in confined space; an automatic de-icer built into the blades so we could fight in the Arctic; Saturn radios so highly encrypted that their transmissions couldn’t be decoded by any intercept; new motors for the CRV7 rockets, making them faster and more accurate; and a unique health monitoring system which enabled the aircraft to automatically diagnose any problems through dozens of microscopic sensors.

  The UK bought sixty-seven of Westland’s finished article for a cool £46 million each – making the Apache AH Mk1 the second most expensive British aircraft ever made, behind the £62-million Eurofighter Typhoon. The whole Apache project set the MoD back £4.13 billion.

  On paper, the British Apache was the most expensive – and best – attack helicopter in aviation history. For once, even the Americans were jealous. All the army needed to do now was find the pilots to fly their new creation. And that was the most challenging part of all.

  As the most technically advanced helicopter in the world, the Apache AH Mk1 was also the hardest to fly. Selection for the eighteen-month conversion course was even more competitive than Special Forces Selection. Of the Army Air Corps’ 800 pilots, only twenty-four could make it into the Corps’ elite, the six serving Apache squadrons, every year – the top 3 per cent of all British Army pilots. There was no shortage of candidates; the instructors would have passed twice as many if they could have. But the bar couldn’t be lowered, or pilots would start to hit the deck.

  To train each Apache pilot from scratch cost £3 million (each custom-made helmet alone had a price tag of £22,915). It took six months just to learn how to fly the machine, another six to know how to fight in it, and a final six to be passed combat ready. And that was if you were already a fully qualified, combat-trained army helicopter pilot. If you weren’t, you’d have to add four months for ground school and learning to fly fixed wing at RAF Barkston Heath, six months learning to fly helicopters at RAF Shawbury, half a year at the School of Army Aviation learning to fly tactically, and a final sixteen-week course in Survival, Evasion and Resistance to Interrogation, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps’ most vigorous training staff. Three years in total.

  ‘I bet it’s not as tough as you and the Yanks make out,’ I said to Billy on Day One. He smiled.

  It was the hardest thing I have ever done, or will ever do. Some of the best pilots I’ve known fell by the wayside during Apache conversion training. Cranchy was an instructor for twelve years. He failed. Paul was the chief instructor for an entire regiment, and he failed. Mac was a display pilot with the Blue Eagles and got an MBE for it. He failed too.

  Why was the aircraft so hard to master? In a nutshell: because of the unimaginably demanding need to multi-task. Taking an Apache into battle was like playing an Xbox, a PlayStation and a chess Grand Master simultaneously – whilst riding Disneyworld’s biggest roller coaster. US studies found that only a very small percentage of human brains could do everything required simultaneously to operate the aircraft.

  Information overload was a major issue. At least ten different new facts had to be registered, processed and acted on every few seconds in the cockpit. We were constantly bombarded with new information – from the flight instruments, four different radio frequencies chattering at the same time, the internal intercom, the weapons computers’ targeting, the defensive aid suite’s threats and the Longbow Radar.

  Then there were the challenges outside the cockpit too. We had to know the position of our wingmen, the whereabouts of other allied jets and helicopters, spot for small arms fire flashes on the ground, remember friendly ground forces’ positions and keep a visual lookout for the target.

  All this not just for a minute or two, but for three hours without a break. Miss one vital element, and you would kill yourself and your co-pilot in an instant.

  US pilots called flying an Apache ‘Riding the dragon’. If you got something wrong or irritated the machine, it turned around and bit you. A cool temperament was even more important than a good pair of eyes and ears – the ability not to panic no matter what was being demanded of you.

  The second great challenge was physical coordination. Flying an Apache almost always meant both hands and feet doing four different things at once. Even our eyes had to learn how to work independently of each other.

  A monocle sat permanently over our right iris. A dozen different instrument readings from around the cockpit were projected into it. At the flick of a button, a range of other images could also be superimposed underneath the green glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the TADS’ or PNVS’ camera images and the Longbow Radars’ targets.

  The monocle left the pilot’s left eye free to look outside the cockpit, saving him the few seconds that it took to look down at the instruments then up again; seconds that could mean the difference between our death and our enemy’s.

  New pilots suffered terrible headaches as the left and right eye competed for dominance. They started within minutes, long before take-off. If you admitted to them, the instructor grounded you immediately – so none of us ever did. Instead, you had to ‘man up’ and get on with it.

  As the eyes adjusted over the following weeks and months the headaches took longer to set in. It was a year before mine disappeared altogether. A few weeks out of the cockpit tho
ugh, and they’d be back again on a high concentration sortie – low level, large formation, poor weather, under pylons, hunting and being hunted by the enemy.

  It took me two years to learn how to ‘see’ properly – how to see in Apache World. I once filmed my face during a sortie with a video camera as an experiment. My eyes whirled independently of each other throughout, like a man possessed.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ Emily said when I showed her the tape. ‘But does it mean you can read two books at once?’

  I tried it. I could.

  Being a member of the world’s most exclusive aviators’ club had its personal price. It was also very tough on Emily, the other wives and girlfriends and especially our children. When we started, our American counterparts warned us about AIDS – Apache Induced Divorce Syndrome. Marriage and the Apache didn’t sit well together.

  To master the machine, we had to eat, sleep and breathe it. It was an obsession, and it had to be. There was never time to stop and relax in the cockpit, the simulator or the classroom. If there was, you were forgetting to do something. ‘You can sleep when you’re dead,’ the instructors loved to say.

  It was the same on the squadron once we’d all qualified. Apache pilots were at work for fourteen hours a day, every day, just to keep on track. You had to stay one step ahead of the aircraft at all times. If you didn’t, it would turn and bite you.

  Unlike any other army units, there were very few ‘sirs’ used among the aircrew in our squadron. Officers called each other by their first names, and the other ranks did the same with each other. We’d gone through so much together, proved ourselves so many times, the ceremony of official title felt redundant. We were all close friends – and it felt odd to call a good mate ‘sir’. Above all, we didn’t have the time.

  There was one more quality you needed to be an Apache pilot. The best attack pilots had the soul of an infantryman. Army Air Corps personnel had always been known as flying soldiers rather than pilots. It’s why we preferred to wear combat fatigues and not flying suits – with the exception of Billy, of course. The founding ethos of the Corps, since the first time soldiers took to the air to artillery spot from their nineteenth-century balloons, was to help the blokes on the ground win the fight – and that wouldn’t ever change.

  ‘We’re going through the wood,’ the ground commander might have said to us as we provided top cover in a Gazelle or a Lynx.

  ‘Roger,’ we’d reply. ‘Move slowly and we’ll cover the treeline and the high ground.’

  You could teach a monkey how to fly; Soviet scientists proved that during the Cold War by attaching electrodes to a cyclic stick. But you couldn’t teach a monkey how to fix a bayonet and charge. To fight an Apache, it wasn’t enough to be a gifted pilot and a geeky tech-head. That would only get you to where you needed to be at the right time. The real challenge was what happened next.

  In the months before we were first sent to Afghanistan, some of the top brass were quite sensitive about classifying the Apache as a killing machine. They didn’t really like us to talk about it, despite the fact we were walking around with a big fuck-off attack helicopter badge on our arms. God knew what they thought we were going to do when we got there.

  To me it was breathtakingly simple. Attack pilots didn’t deliver soup. We didn’t help old ladies across the road, and we didn’t shoot out lollipops. Our main battle function was to close with the enemy and kill them.

  Snipers and Apache pilots were the only two combatants to get a detailed look at the face of the man they were about to kill. Nine times out of ten, we’d watch them in close-up on a five-inch-square screen before we pulled the trigger. It was no different to a sniper fixing his quarry in the sights of his bolt action rifle until the optimum moment to engage. We shared the same mindset: the mindset of a professional assassin.

  The first sixteen of us qualified in October 2004, allowing 656 Squadron to be declared an Initial Operating Capability – a viable strike force, but unable to sustain prolonged operations. On 5 May 2006, the squadron deployed to Afghanistan, and we were finally declared ready to fight as a battlegroup – six days into the deployment.

  The Apache force arrived a month after the rest of the brigade, and none of the ground commanders really knew what to do with us at first. Years late and way over budget, the Apache programme had been derided as a white elephant by everyone in the military – an overpriced Cold War glamour machine of little practical worth in a twenty-first-century close combat counter-insurgency. They sent us out on missions anyway, because we were there. Then we were called to our first firefight – and we showed what we could do.

  Within a few weeks, they were converted. So much so that 3 Para’s Commanding Officer often refused to allow his men out of their platoon houses unless they had an Apache above them.

  We proved the aircraft was phenomenally good at close – sometimes very close – air support, swiftly overtaking the Harrier as the troops’ aircraft of choice. We were the Paras’ big brother; we turned up and immediately turned the tables on the bullies picking on them. Soon, the lads on the ground began to refer to us as ‘the muscle’. ‘Things were looking pretty shitty until the muscle turned up,’ was a regular refrain in the cookhouse.

  For us, the mad summer was one constant rush between one under fire platoon house to another besieged district centre. At times, the job felt like playing the Whack-A-Mole game at the fair; the one where you never know which of the multiple holes the little bugger will pop out of first. You have to thump it quick with a mallet, but as soon as you have, another pops up from another hole. If you don’t keep on smashing them hard, you lose.

  On a few occasions we almost did lose. I was on the phone home when we got the Broken Arrow call from Now Zad. Broken Arrow is an emergency call for assistance from any available aircraft. It meant the platoon house was in the process of being overrun. We got up there to find the company of Royal Fusiliers in a grenade fight with the Taliban at their walls.

  Our major weakness was a limited play time. Our fuel and weapons load would always run out eventually, and then we had to go back to base or get relieved by another Apache pair.

  Sometimes all we had to do was turn up. The enemy had learned to fear us. ‘When the Mosquitoes come, stay underground,’ Taliban commanders were overheard telling their men. But most of the time they fought on regardless.

  I must have been in twenty different battles on that first tour; some a few minutes long, others lasting for hours. Yet despite all of that, there I was, sitting on my cot at the start of the second tour pondering my destiny.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying. After twenty-two and a half years of close scrapes all over the world, I’d come close to rolling a number seven several times – not least in Aldershot. And I’d believed for a long time that if your number was up, it was up – there was no point in fussing about it. What I was really bothered about was dying now.

  I’d got away with the first tour, and that was supposed to be it for me. I just couldn’t help thinking that it would be a crying shame if I checked out now, minutes before I was about to leave. I’d been a bad boy in my past, and got away with all of that too. Maybe it was my turn next: fate, karma, Sod’s Law, Murphy’s Law; or just plain old tough shit – call it what you will. All I knew was that one bloke only gets a certain amount of luck in any one life, and my lucky bag should have been nigh on empty.

  I didn’t tell Emily about any of this. Instead, I quietly upped my life insurance to the maximum, updated my will and ensured everything was in order for her and my kids if I didn’t come back.

  But Emily had her own worries. Not long before I left for the second tour, we’d agreed to start a family together. We’d been together for years, she was thirty-four and the time felt right. I hadn’t realised how much the decision had affected her.

  On my last night, Emily made me promise not to do anything stupid. It was a promise that I told her I had every intention of keeping – and I meant it. Th
en she gave me a tiny little good luck charm, a silver angel the size of a postage stamp.

  ‘Have it on you always, it’ll keep you safe,’ she said.

  I burst out laughing. She burst into tears.

  So I carried it in my top right breast pocket which was double sealed with buttons and Velcro. It went everywhere I went – as much from guilt as superstition … to start with, anyway.

  HANDOVER

  There was an awful lot to be done in the five days before 664 Squadron left. Our handover had to be seamless. It was vital that the quality of Apache support to the guys on the ground wasn’t affected. There were lessons to be learned from their tour; we had to adapt to all the procedural changes and familiarise ourselves with any aircraft issues that might have cropped up after three more months of hard combat.

  There were some nervous people in London. An awful lot of money had been spent on the Apache and the last thing they wanted was for us to break one in less than a year of ops. Because it was so new, the procurement pencil-necks back at the MoD watched us like hawks.

  The MoD had given us an encyclopaedic document known as the Release to Service which told us what we were and were not allowed to do with the aircraft. If any pilot broke any of the RTS rules – in the air or on the ground – he would be investigated. If he was found to have broken them deliberately, he would be removed from flying duties – permanently.

  As Mr Sky Cop, the flying regs were poor old Billy’s bag. I didn’t envy him the responsibility, but it was good wind-up material.

  ‘I take it looping the Apache is still out this tour is it, Billy?’

  ‘Don’t even think about it. You’re only an average pilot, remember.’ Then, under his breath but loud enough for us to hear: ‘Unlike me.’

  ‘I suppose a barrel roll or two is out the question too?’

  While Billy exchanged notes with 664’s QHI, I ironed out the weapons systems’ nuances with their Weapons Officer. I also signed for the gun tape laptop, on which recordings of all our weapons releases were stored. The gun tape laptop was kept in a special safe in the Joint Helicopter Force Forward office. A lot of the material on it was highly classified. ‘Kill TV’ could be really damaging to us if it fell into the wrong hands. Something stuck on YouTube under a provocative headline could make us look like war criminals.