by Al Venter
As these rebels increase their strength—and there is no shortage of either new recruits or adequate war materiéls to stoke the ongoing conflict—they have become more daring. It has become more and more likely that an aircraft will be brought down. This immediately raises the spectre of what will happen once the rebels obtain MANPADS or SAMs. Should that occur, the game will drastically change and everyone will have to adapt their flying techniques to counter this radical development.
It is worth mentioning that news reports emanating from Central Asia during 2010 and 2011 suggested not only that the rebels had ground-to-air missiles, but that they have already been deployed against Coalition Force aircraft. One report mentioned a heat-seeking missile that brought down a NATO transport helicopter in 2007 killing five American troops as well as a Briton and a Canadian.1 The US-built Chinook was struck in its left engine shortly after taking off near the Helmand River. The report stated that the impact ‘projected the aft-end of the helicopter upwards as it burst into flame, followed immediately by a nose dive into the ground that left no survivors’.
There has been little follow-up on that development and Nellis has his doubts that it was a MANPAD. Instead, he puts the loss down to a strike from a well-placed RPG-7. Still, he and his colleagues are concerned because the civilian version of Mi-8 is not equipped with exhaust suppressors or flare dispensing systems to counter missile lock-on. Once the SAMs do arrive, he reckons, pilots will have to revert to flying fast and low, which would then take them into the threat zone of small arms fire.
As he comments, the helicopter’s exhaust is substantial and would obviously attract any infrared (IR) seeking missile, which makes it particularly vulnerable to ground-to-air missiles. Additionally, some of the new generation SAMs are contrast trackers, so even IR suppression equipment, such as exhaust protection or low infrared reflective paint, would not be all that helpful.
At the same time, this is not something new. It is on record that the Americans gave the mujahideen rebels their first hand-held Stinger missiles. They also taught the rebels how to use them, which they eventually did with aplomb, bringing down hundreds of helicopters and jets during the course of a war that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
During the Soviet invasion, the rebels employed every opportunity to fire at aircraft—both fixed-wing and helicopters—and almost always from well-located strategic positions on hills and mountaintops. These attacks are customarily referred to as ‘Nomadic Ambushes’.2
What quickly becomes clear to those who are aware of Afghanistan’s recent history and who visit the country regularly, is that many of the tactics originally employed by the mujahideen against Soviet forces in the 1980s have been adapted by today’s Taliban guerrillas. There are numerous instances of rebels targeting civilian aircraft in remote areas. Recently, a helicopter belonging to one of the private security groups took a lot of fire while flying down a valley in the Khost area, a strongly contested region adjacent to Pakistan’s northern frontier districts.
Because of the mountains, the pilot was not able to take a direct route to his destination. Ideally, he should have crossed a series of ridges, but as he admitted afterwards, these were too high for his machine. Consequently, he had to follow a circuitous route below the peaks—a flight path that took him through several valleys that had seen recent action.
One of the areas he traversed was just below a mountaintop peak, where he had to fly barely 300ft from the granite cliff face in order to break through into the valley below. Clearly, the Taliban had seen this happen before and they were waiting. The helicopter was not only holed several times by heavy machine gun fire, but one of its passengers was wounded.
The consensus among a number of pilots operating in Afghanistan today is that, given the opportunity, the Taliban has the ability to muster its forces in a short space of time, especially when aircraft are involved. As Nellis comments, that is exactly why he insists on flying the more direct routes over the hills but, obviously, he varies his track by a couple of miles whenever he uses the route. Most of the other pilots, the military included, he says, tend to use the same flight paths when they enter the region and it is to be expected that some of them end up being blasted. He recalls:
So it wasn’t all that surprising that shortly after first arriving in Central Asia, one of the pilots accused me of being reckless for avoiding established routes. A couple of days later he came back after a flight and said he had been shot at while following a route through the mountains that I’d always made a serious effort to avoid. What every pilot knows, or should be aware of, is that if a helicopter flies low over an area where there is an insurgent presence, the Taliban will attempt to destroy it.
Just after I started flying in Afghanistan, while returning to Kabul from Sharana, we were flying about 1,000ft above the ground over a village when I heard the distinctive sounds of rounds passing pretty damn close—it was that same old ‘rat-tat-tat typewriter noise’ of old. The firing lasted only for a few seconds, but it certainly got the adrenalin pumping and was quite an experience after all these years. The shots missed and we suffered no damage, but then it is not easy to hit a moving target, especially at any kind of altitude.
These experiences are among a slew of problems that our crowd recently experienced in Afghanistan and part of the problem is that there is precious little sharing of essential operational information within the aviation fraternity working there. The truth is that the military gives away absolutely nothing. If one of the civilian helicopters encounters a problem, there is no central organization that effectively disseminates details of the dangers that might be involved, even when they are of critical significance.
It is of little concern to those higher up that by withholding such intelligence, lives might be lost. It will obviously filter down eventually, but there is no hurry. For example, if a helicopter is shot at from a specific location, the other operators often hear nothing about the incident for a while. More often than not a helicopter from another company will fly to the same location, and because the pilot has had no prior warning of what he may encounter along the way, he is also targeted.
Another major problem in Afghanistan is the lack of communication between some foreign pilots and air traffic control. The truth is that some Eastern European pilots not only speak bad English, they barely understand the language. Most are either Russian or Ukrainian and the majority are coached to handle basic air traffic control language and not much else. In fact, there is nothing about Afghanistan—either in military or civilian contexts—that is ‘average’. Pilots are often instructed to change course or hold over some area because of rebel activity or because the local circuit is busy, which they often are. Consequently, there can be confusion between foreign pilots and air traffic controllers. Total chaos has almost reigned on numerous occasions, with more near misses involving helicopter traffic than anybody is prepared to acknowledge. However, choppers are not high speed, so the pilots involved usually have ample warning and are able to break away from harm’s way.
As Nellis admits, there can also be a problem, when operating in the vicinity of built-up areas such as Kabul, of heavy frequency jamming initiated by NATO Forces to prevent Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) being detonated by mobile phones or radio signals. As he explains:
The result is a harsh, high-pitched, ear-shattering ruckus, something akin to the din from the microphone feedback of a heavy metal rock band. Sometimes, the jamming gets so intense that we are unable to hear instructions from the tower, which could develop into a serious flying hazard. It is particularly bad around the airport and adjacent diplomatic areas.
There have been times when we’ve been unable to follow tower instructions … even worse, we couldn’t visually acquire the tower. Had we been on a collision course in poor visibility, we probably wouldn’t have been able to take evasive action in time.
I remember returning from Bagram Air Base after a sortie in weather that
can best be described as marginal. We’d been enveloped in rain and slight mist: something like 200ft AGL and had very poor forward visibility. Vectored to the approach for the runway by the tower—who was also keeping separation from other helicopters arriving at the airport more or less at the same time, there were some tense moments because we were aware that there was a formation of two other helicopters positioning the same approach. As it happened, we all landed safely. However, the most stressful moments I experienced flying over Afghanistan always occurred when I was returning to Kabul in conditions of that same poor visibility.
Also, the weather in Afghanistan can be extremely demanding and often changes very rapidly and without warning, especially during winter. Every year aircraft are lost in bad weather, with many of them crashing into the mountains. One technique one pilot soon assimilated when flying in potentially bad weather was to continually visually check the route behind us and for good reason. Weather fronts often close in very quickly, cutting off what is occasionally the only route back to safety. Airframe icing is also a constant problem during the cold months. We would make a point of avoiding snow and rainstorms or any evident precipitation, particularly if the temperature fell below 5 degrees centigrade.
Bad weather pilot stories in Afghanistan are legion. A couple of years ago, one of the more experienced Bell-412 pilots was heading back to Kabul in relatively marginal weather conditions, when he observed a snowstorm ahead, which within minutes had completely enveloped his aircraft. He had to make an immediate precautionary landing as he was in total instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) and was on the verge of losing visual contact with the ground. Left with no other option, he was forced to land in a walled compound belonging to one of the local farmers who, fortunately for the crew, was not a Taliban sympathizer. The local family took the crew into their house and looked after them until a security force was able to reach their position, secure the helicopter and take them back to Kabul. The helicopter was recovered untouched a couple of days later after the bad weather had sufficiently cleared. Apart from the poor visibility, we also avoid flying in IMC conditions because we are not issued with oxygen breathing equipment.
To be able to safely fly in cloud or in poor weather and to carry out effective instrument let-downs at Kabul, we need to get to at least 18,000ft to avoid the mountains that surround the airport, which is Afghanistan’s main airfield. According to Civil Air Regulations, we are not allowed to fly higher than 12,000ft without oxygen, so our operations are strictly day VFR flying. Helicopters are allowed to fly at night in Afghanistan only if they are equipped with night vision goggles (NVGs) and the pilots are trained to use them.
Then comes summer, when temperatures can rise to more than 40 degrees Centigrade. These conditions require a totally new set of parameters and pilots have to be careful how they load and fly their aircraft. High temperatures make the air less dense at higher altitudes. This means that careful planning has to be carried out before each flight, as well as for take-off out of some of the confined LZs in which we are required to land. Some helicopters have crashed after take-off because there was not sufficient power available in hot and high conditions.
The same situation holds for Kabul, which is also hot and high in the summer months and where, at the best of times, visibility is barely acceptable. The haze that results from dust combining with the smoke from tens of thousands of wood fires, lit by local inhabitants to cook their food, is sometimes so bad in the mornings that the airfield is declared IMC. Moreover, navigating your way out of there to reporting points can be a nightmare experience as not only is the visibility bad, but the air lanes are overcrowded. Returning to Kabul can be even worse than leaving, as Russian pilots can seldom be found over the point where they have reported themselves to be, which is a serious hazard facing all aviators operating in the region.
Dust storms in the drier season are intermittent and often appear without warning. On numerous occasions we would return to Kabul to find the airport and the town completely obscured. As a result, we would be forced to fly the approach paths from the compulsory reporting area that surrounds the airfield at 100ft AGL with forward visibility of less than 200 metres. When the numerous radio and telephone masts and towers in and around Kabul are added into the equation, it means that bringing an aircraft in to land needs a constant awareness of the pilot’s position over the ground in order to avoid flying into one of these obstacles.
Then follows the ultimate delight: the occasional Afghan citizen who simply has to test his AK-47 the moment a helicopter flies over his mud dwelling. Fortunately, the visibility is so bad under these conditions that the shooter usually has no time to take aim. The only thing that can be done is to keep the speed of the aircraft as high as possible and disappear into the gloom.
The world’s largest transport jet—this one built by the Russians— regularly landed at Kabul Airport, usually on charter to Coalition Forces. Photo: Neall Ellis
The reality is that the insurgents are extremely trigger-happy. They will use every opportunity to shoot down overflying helicopters. It doesn’t help that many of the USAID military bases are situated in some of the most inaccessible parts of not only Afghanistan, but of the whole of Central Asia. Although there are roads linking these outlying bases to main roads, they are normally unsurfaced and most have been primed by the Taliban with IEDs. That makes road travel dangerous and the personnel based in these camps obviously prefer to travel by air because of the threat of ambush on the ground. Where there is no suitable runway for a fixedwing craft to land, helicopters are extensively used.
When we were tasked to fly to Qalat in the Zabol Province south of Kabul, on one of our routine supply runs, we would offload our passengers at the PRT base and then fly to Lagman FOB to refuel, which is a journey of perhaps two or three kilometres by road. The reasoning given by both military and civilian personnel at the two bases was that it was too dangerous for the passengers to have to travel by road from Lagman to the PRT, even though the two were less than a rifle shot from each other.
I argued often enough while in the country, that if NATO forces were actually serious about dominating the areas around their bases, pro-government personnel and troops should be able to walk the short distance without too much fear of attack or kidnapping.
However, as a South African with considerable experience in our bush wars in Angola, South-West Africa and Zambia during the 1970s and 1980s, I know that it was often not easy to comprehend the background to the politics behind some of the decision-making that takes place, usually behind closed doors. Even so, the question needs to be asked: why has the situation been allowed to deteriorate to this parlous state? Like the Soviets before them, the Coalition are fighting a counter-insurgency campaign that has escalated steadily in the past few years, yet, Coalition Forces on the ground in Afghanistan remain isolated behind their fortifications for the duration, instead of venturing out in a bid to dominate the countryside. Effectively, the powers that be have allowed the Taliban to take control. More to the point, the average Afghan knows it.
It is no longer a secret that the Taliban are in the process of not only dominating, but also consolidating their hold over, just about the whole of the country, particularly the rural areas. In some areas the Taliban command structure even dictates to NATO forces and government officials exactly when the local commercial mobile telephone transmission towers can be switched on or off. I am not the only outsider who finds it amazing that the guerrillas are in a position to dictate what happens in an area which was pretty well populated by NATO troops. Then again, some of the more obscure European partners in NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan are notoriously loathe to committing themselves to any kind of offensive action, never mind fight a war.
During the normal course of operations in Afghanistan, we flew with three separate GPS tracking devices fitted to our helicopter. All were for emergency purposes. The first was a Blue Force Tracker that was issued by the U.S. State Departm
ent. When its emergency buttons are activated, it is supposed to offer some kind of result within 15 minutes and this can be anything from a close air support, fixed-wing, strike aircraft or a heliborne ground support group.
Then comes the Fast Wave Tracker, which is monitored by our company operations room in Afghanistan and a third alarm system known as the SpiderTrack System, which is monitored by company operations personnel in South Africa. Essentially, the idea was that should we be fired upon during flight, obliged to make a forced landing in hostile terrain due to enemy ground fire, or even have an in-flight emergency such as an engine failure, we would activate our distress signal and, in theory, assistance should be forthcoming almost immediately.
However, there was never a guarantee that the cavalry would respond. We were operating civilian aircraft, which were regarded by some of the military as distinctly low priority, even if we were responsible for supplying outlying bases with most of their essential needs.
On one flight from FOB Kalagush in the Nuristan Province to Asadabad to the East, I had my one and only in-flight engine failure while flying in Southern Afghanistan. We had our first warning of impending problems just as we crossed a ridge at an altitude of about 10,000ft. As expected, the mountain sides were almost sheer and, from a quick look at the options, I realised that there was nothing that even vaguely resembled a suitable landing place as there were valleys and gorges just about everywhere with very little flat country in-between where we might have been able to put down in an emergency.
After the faulty engine had been shut down, we initiated our Blue Force Tracker system and broadcasted a series of Maydays. This was essential since we were flying over territory that was acknowledged as hostile. Obviously, had the remaining engine also given up the ghost, we would have preferred to have an armed escort to provide us with adequate top cover as we were unsure of the situation on the ground. This insecurity was most probably due to the fact that two days earlier we had witnessed a very substantial military operation against insurgent positions in the same valley as the one along which we were flying.