Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  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 Army helicopters at that time were equipped with ‘chaff’ launchers-devices that chucked bundles of metal filaments into the path of an oncoming radio frequency (RF) missile in the hope of seducing it away from the target-so, again, your only hope of survival was getting into cover while evasively manoeuvring, trying to break the lock.

  The fun stuff was flying and fighting against other helicopters. Here, the baseline threat was the Hind. It was Soviet Cold War-era, but still a fearsome piece of kit-armed with a chin-mounted cannon and an array of unguided missiles that fired ‘on-axis’-in line with the nose of the aircraft. You didn’t want a Hind anywhere near your six o’clock position; it didn’t matter what you were flying, it would simply shoot you out of the sky.

  The trick was to keep out of its twelve o’clock position. The Hind was a monster and could stay in the air for a long time, but it was tough to manoeuvre. We had to close in at an angle and keep turning with him, remaining in a tighter circle than he was capable of-we called it a furball-so he couldn’t bring his weapons to bear. Then, even in an unarmed Gazelle, we could hold him to a stalemate. With a ‘crew-served weapon’-a machine gun sticking out of a door or window-the Lynx was appropriately equipped to take on a Hind; together, we could kill it. In true World War One dogfight style, I might even be able to loose off a shot with my 9 mm pistol.

  The point was to stay in the fight-as Churchill said: never give up.

  Meanwhile, my Apache dossier was getting thicker.

  I’d discovered something significant. Each Apache squadron was going to need four specialists: a Qualified Helicopter Instructor (QHI), a Weapons Instructor (WI), a Supervisory Forward Air Controller (SupFAC) and an Electronic Warfare Instructor (EWI).

  The Apache was more than a gunship; it was one of the most sophisticated EW platforms in the business. Not only was it equipped with radar able to locate and track any threat-ground or air-with a single sweep of its antenna, it also had a highly sophisticated electronic defensive aids system for counteracting enemy missiles. With the Apache just a few years away from delivery, I needed to know about this stuff.

  In 1999, I booked myself on an EW foundation course organised and run by the RAF at Cranwell in Lincolnshire. This side of the Atlantic, there was no one better than the crabs at detailing the threat and its countermeasures. The course was chock-solid with all the maths and physics that I’d never bothered about at school. Day One, Lesson One was a ‘101’ on the electromagnetic spectrum.

  The threats that primarily concerned us were heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles. In most cases the hottest part of the aircraft was the engine exhaust. A combat jet, which moved at high speed through the air and generated considerable heat friction as it did so, had ‘hot-spots’ on the parts of its frame that were most exposed to the airflow-the nose and leading edges of the wings especially-and these could also be targeted by particularly sophisticated types of infrared missile.

  Airframe heating was not an issue for a helicopter and the missile automatically homed in on the engine exhausts, which, to the seeker, glowed against the cold background of the sky. Once an infrared heat-seeker had locked onto you, there was precious little you could do in a helicopter to break the lock. Salvation was at hand, however, if you had some or all of the following kit: a Missile Approach Warning System (MAWS) that automatically alerted you to a surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch (its optics scanned the ground for the flash or plume of a missile motor’s ignition); an infrared jammer that literally blinded the missile seeker; ‘baffles’ that dissipated and rapidly cooled the engine exhaust to a level it couldn’t be seen; and flares, usually triggered by the MAWS, which fired into the sky around the helicopter in the hope the missile would lock onto them instead of us.

  The heart of any system for defeating radar-guided SAMs was the RWR. It gave warning-visually and audibly-that you were being acquired, tracked or launched at by a radar system. It would also tell you the radar’s location and type, provided it was recognised by its threat-library.

  Because the missile and its radar guidance system had to go through various engagement modes while in the air-all of which involved ‘painting’ the helicopter with radar-energy for ever more precise targeting data as it closed in on us-the RWR maintained a handle on the one piece of news we really needed: how close we were to being blown out of the sky.

  With the foundation phase under my belt, I booked myself onto an EW course and then an advanced EW course. This introduced me to other aspects of the electronic battle-how, for example, jamming platforms like the US Navy’s EA-6B Prowler could be employed in a package of attacking aircraft to ‘burn’ a hole through the enemy’s radar coverage. Once this hole had been created-the SAM and air defence operators would see it as impenetrable interference on their radar screens-attacking aircraft, including helicopters, could sneak into enemy airspace and hit their targets w
ithout being fired upon.

  This was known as a ‘soft kill’-temporarily blinding the radar rather than destroying it. For a ‘hard kill’, I learned about the capabilities of the US HARM and UK ALARM weapon systems. Launched from their parent aircraft, these missiles would pick out enemy emitters and fly down the beam till they hit the antenna and destroyed it. Both missiles were so sophisticated that even if the radar operator switched off his system, they would have plotted its position by GPS and/or inertial navigation equipment and destroy it anyway.

  It wasn’t until the last week of the course that I learned about the Apache’s own EW self-protection capabilities. By now, details of the Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aids System had started to emerge. HIDAS was unlike anything that had ever been fitted to a helicopter before. Four RWR receivers-two either side of the nose and two more behind the engines-provided interlocking arcs of coverage; they covered and plotted any radar, ground or air, that emitted a pulse anywhere in the vicinity of the aircraft.

  A highly developed MAWS detected the heat plume of any ground or airborne threats-especially important if the helicopter was to stand any chance of surviving in a threat environment where man-portable, shoulder-launched air defence systems (ManPADS) were present. These weapons had developed rapidly since the US Stinger and the Soviet SA-7 had made their first appearance thirty years before. Shoulder-launched SAMs like the Russian SA-14 were highly adept at ignoring all but the most sophisticated flares punched out by an aircraft and were capable of engagements up to 12,000 feet.

  The Apache also had a Laser Warning Receiver System (LWRS)-two detectors above the engines and two on the fuselage sides-that would detect if the aircraft had been targeted by a laser-designator, the prelude to it being hit by a laser-guided missile.

  All threat data were processed by a central computer which, having computed the type, range and bearing of the threat, would then decide the best countermeasure to defeat it. There were three switch settings in the cockpit-manual, semi-automatic and automatic-which allowed the pilot to decide what level of autonomy he wanted to confer on the system. We were assured, however, that it worked extremely effectively in automatic mode and that, by and large, it was best to leave the system, not the pilot, to decide what kind of countermeasures to dispense and when.

  Like HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HIDAS’s (female) Voice Warning System (VWS) would alert the crew to any given threat. The information would also be displayed on one of the two multi-purpose displays; there were two MPDs in each cockpit-TV screens used to display flight, critical mission data and targeting images. Imminent threats-prioritised at any given moment-were displayed in positions relative to the aircraft.

  It was probably inevitable that the VWS had already earned herself a nickname: Bitchin’ Betty.

  Before I could ‘graduate’ from the course, I had to take an exam-and it wasn’t your average GCSE. We were to mount a national evacuation operation from an island-whose geography resembled Sicily-embroiled in civil unrest. Some Brits had been taken hostage. I was the commander of a force tasked to fly in, free them and fly them out.

  Using the knowledge I’d amassed over the previous few months, I decided to mount an operation using Apaches, EA-6Bs, a B-2 Stealth Bomber and a C-130.

  I jammed the island’s surveillance radars with the EA-6Bs and sent in the Apaches to take out the coastal radars. The B-2, so stealthy that it was largely invisible to radar anyway, then dropped a stick of satellite-guided 2,000-lb Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs on the command centres. Amidst the chaos, Special Forces were airdropped in to rescue the hostages. Once they had safely ex-filtrated the danger zone, I sent in the C-130 low level over the sea, chaperoned by Apaches, to airlift them out.

  I now had an intuitive feel for how EW could master the battlefield. Although it wasn’t a dedicated EW platform-unlike the EA-6B-the Apache was stuffed with so much electronic wizardry that it would enable the Army Air Corps to do things with helicopters it had never dreamed of before.

  I did my EW instructor’s course in early 2001. With the arrival of the first Apaches in-country, there was a buzz about our quantum leap in capability. Even though I’d only ever sat in one once, nearly ten years earlier, I felt I was really beginning to know this machine, to understand how it worked.

  I began a war of attrition on 3 Regiment’s Adjutant to get posted 200 miles further north, to Dishforth in North Yorkshire, the future home of the Apache. He wasn’t up for it and neither were the pen-pushers in Glasgow, but bull-headed perseverance finally got me within reach of the man I’d last crossed swords with during the finale of BATUS, Lieutenant Colonel Iain Thomson.

  On the day of my interview, I popped in to pay my respects to the commander of 656 Squadron, who tipped me the wink that Tommo was in ebullient mood; he was still riding high on the news that his regiment had been selected to receive the most important piece of kit the army had procured in years. But while CO’s interviews were scheduled to last twenty minutes, I’d be lucky to get ten.

  I knocked on his office door. There was a growl from within and I entered. Tommo barely glanced up as I snapped a salute.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Macy,’ he said. ‘Still bending the rules, are we?’

  I said nothing, just prayed he wasn’t going to fob me off with a Lynx conversion course.

  Tommo got up from behind his desk and strolled over to the window, hands behind his back. This was it: Win or lose time. I had to make every shot count.

  I took a deep breath and told him what I’d been up to in the months since I’d last seen him, what I’d learned at every level of my recent training, and the ideas I’d developed about Air Combat Tactics.

  There were moments when he responded as if I was talking Swahili, but when I finally shut up his eyes shone. A week later I was making a PowerPoint presentation to the boss of Joint Helicopter Command (JHC), an amalgam of all the helicopter activity undertaken by the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Three days after that I ran through the presentation again for the Director of Army Aviation.

  We ended up with a plan to establish a ‘purple’ ACT Instructor’s course; a course with a dual objective-to teach pilots of unarmed helicopters like the Gazelle and Chinook how to get into a furball and survive, and to teach gunship pilots the new world order.

  THE HUNTER

  At the end of 2001, Tommo fired out a questionnaire to all pilots in 9 Regiment: who didn’t want to do the Apache course and why? Surprisingly, not everybody was keen. I guess some thought, why do I want to go and learn all this new stuff, when I’m already at the top of the tree? The money’s coming in, the wife’s happy…

  Not me. I couldn’t wait.

  The first Apache arrived at Middle Wallop in the summer of 2002 and the list of those selected for the Apache Conversion To Type (CTT) course number one was posted in Regimental Headquarters. My name was on it. There were twenty-one pilots earmarked for CTT1, one of whom would be the new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Felton. So that left twenty operational pilots for 656 Squadron’s eight Apaches, enough for five flights: HQ Flight with the boss, Ops Officer and two QHIs, and four more, each manned by a flight commander, a specialist and two others.

  With two seats in each bird, the minimum they needed was sixteen; in other words, not all of us would make it.

  I knew that ten years’ flying experience didn’t mean I was a shoe-in. The Apache was an immensely complex machine to master; I needed to make myself indispensable. I had ticked the EW Officer box, but I had my eye on the Weapons Officer’s course. It could lead to the sexiest job in Army aviation: Squadron Weapons Officer-guns, rockets and missiles; right up my street-and the more I learned now, the better.

  Three of us from 656 were assigned to a bespoke Apache Weapons Officer’s course. My old mate Scottie would be there; he was going to become the Weapons Instructor for 673 Apache Training Squadron at Middle Wallop. It was billed as the most in-depth course we had ever
attempted. If we managed to jump through every hoop, we’d end up advising on Apache weapons tactics to senior officers, teaching weapons and firing techniques to Apache aircrew, planning and running Apache live firing ranges, and designing and running Apache weapons missions in the Boeing simulators.

  Captain Paul Mason started the first day as he meant to go on-grilling us on what we knew. I’d learned shit-loads and was keen to show him. There was no pass mark, thank God; we realised we actually knew jack-shit. I think I got my name right and that was about it.

  Paul was the Apache weapons guru. A good-looking lad from the north-east, he wasn’t physically imposing, but boy, did he walk tall. He’d studied weapons, sights and sensors in the USA and decided there and then to rewrite the rulebook. This horrendously complex course was his baby.

  It sounded as though it would take us half a lifetime to develop sufficient understanding to even come within reach of the hardware. He left us in no doubt that to become a weapons, sights and sensors instructor on this aircraft we would need a level of knowledge so comprehensive our brains would feel like they were about to explode. I immersed myself totally and quickly discovered what he meant.

  The Cold War had fostered a proliferation of single-role platforms-ships, tanks and aircraft that were each designed for one purpose and one purpose only. The Apache was one of the new breed of multi-role ISTAR asset-a relatively new acronym for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance. It could be flown from either seat. The gunner sat up front, the pilot in the rear, but the pilot could activate the weapons and the gunner could fly the aircraft. A series of back-up systems ensured that if a critical piece of kit got hit-or even the pilot-the Apache could still get home.