Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  The helmet-mounted display harmonised man and machine. The helmet itself was connected to the aircraft by two electrical leads: the first for comms, the second for the sensors. As soon as you powered up the aircraft, a pair of surveyors behind each seat transmitted pulsed infrared beams and the four helmet sensors let the system know the position of the pilot’s head relative to the cockpit.

  You then stared down the Boresight Reticule Unit (BRU), a tube on top of the coaming which contained a series of concentric circles, through the crosshair within the monocle over your right eye. When your right eye, crosshair and bull’s-eye were perfectly aligned, the aircraft knew precisely where you were looking.

  The monocle display could get pretty busy. It showed the direction in which the aircraft was headed, and where both crew members were looking. The pilot would generally have flight symbology-airspeed, altitude and distance to the next waypoint-displayed, and the gunner weapon symbology: to know ‘range to source’-the distance to whatever target he happened to be scoping. If either of us actioned a weapon, weapon symbology would automatically kick in.

  Behind the symbology, we could view whatever was being looked at by the Target Acquisition and Designation Sight (TADS) System or the Pilot’s Night Vision System (PNVS) (known as the ‘Pinvis’). It was like viewing a movie, complete with subtitles, projected on a window, while still being able to see through to the outside world.

  The TADS day television-DTV-camera image could also be displayed on the monocle, along with the Pinvis or TADS thermal image.

  In thermal mode, vehicle engines and people would glow white, day or night; if it was cold enough, we could even trace footprints. The Apache gunner and pilot were now becoming like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: hunting for the target in both normal and thermal vision simultaneously. This took multi-tasking to a new level: your right eye viewed targeting symbology and a computer-generated thermal picture of the world one inch away, while your left scanned the outside world in full colour at infinity.

  We had two principal means of detecting targets-via the TADS and the Fire Control Radar. The FCR-the heart of the Longbow system of the ‘D’ model Apache-was awesome. Its Air Targeting Mode (air-to-air targeting) and Terrain Profile Mode (enhanced terrain avoidance navigation) were impressive enough, but the Ground Targeting Mode’s ‘RF missile engagement’ capacity blew my mind. In a double sweep of its antenna, lasting just three seconds, the FCR could recognise and detect 1,024 targets. Within the same three seconds, it would automatically prioritise the top 256, accurately locate them, automatically store their coordinates in its computer and then display them to the crew. It would display the top sixteen targets to the crew in priority of threat, selecting which to destroy and in what order.

  When flying in squadron formation, the lead aircraft could coordinate with the others via a secure datalink-an unjammable, encrypted, wireless modem-to ensure that no two gunships went for the same target. Two Apaches would watch a flank each and cover the rear while the other six would be the attack aircraft. The gunner could break down the display into six ‘lanes’ on his MPD-the multi-purpose display TV on his instrument panel-selecting sixteen targets per lane. With the push of a button, each attacking Apache would then receive their own share of the targets. A few seconds later ninety-six missiles would navigate towards their individual targets. Once the missiles had impacted at the point of maximum mass, each Apache sent its ‘shot-at’ file to the leader with the push of another button: not bad for one minute’s work.

  The TADS turret was situated in the helicopter’s nose, and was the heart of the Apache’s day and night sensor capabilities. The Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) system lay behind a tinted window on the left. The gunner’s FLIR and the pilot’s Pinvis constituted cryogenically cooled optical cameras, highly sensitive to any heat above minus 200°C. They could find a mouse in a wheat field from a thousand metres.

  The clear window on the right contained a laser designator, laser range finder, laser spot tracker, the Direct View Optics (DVO) and the DTV camera. The DVO was linked to the Optical Relay Tube (ORT)-the big metal block that jutted out about a foot from the gunner’s cockpit console.

  When you placed your forehead on the ORT’s browpad and selected ‘DVO Mode’, you saw a magnified picture of the real world in glorious colour. There were two fields of view: wide and narrow.

  The DVO confirmed vital recognition data to a Forward Air Controller (FAC), your crew member or other members of your flight-‘the target building has yellow window frames…’-preventing fratricide or collateral damage. The DVO was permanently slaved to the TADS; wherever the TADS led, the DVO followed.

  On either side of the gunner’s ORT were what looked like steel PlayStation hand grips, covered in switches and buttons. They controlled sights, sensors and weapons. Each and every button had its own distinct feel and shape-one was smooth and concave, another was serrated and convex; another was shaped like a Chinese hat. You didn’t want to dispatch a missile at your own troops when you really intended to find out their range.

  The DTV camera had three fields of view: wide, narrow and zoom. It was called ‘low-light TV’, but it wasn’t really for low light-it worked on a wavelength that allowed it to penetrate ‘battlefield obscurants’, primarily optimised to cut through dust and smoke.

  Everything the TADS DTV, FLIR and FCR could see could be viewed in the monocle for quick targeting, on both MPDs for target detail and pinpoint accuracy, and on a small TV on the ORT.

  With the flick of a button, the gunner could switch from FLIR to DTV and back again, depending on how much smoke or dust was in the air and the level of heat contrast presented by the target.

  When you gripped the controls either side of the ORT, each of your index fingers found a guarded trigger: the right for the laser, the left for missile-release. Once you were lined up on the target, you pulled the right trigger to the first detent to establish range to target. The second detent gave a constant range readout, accurate to a centimetre or two over several kilometres, and painted the target with laser energy.

  The missile ‘saw’ the laser energy bouncing off the target. Pressing the left trigger launched it off the rail like a whippet after a rabbit.

  Shit… I thought. We really could accidentally demolish our own troops if we got them the wrong way around.

  Each helicopter’s laser was ‘coded’ so that missiles didn’t get confused in the air. The TADS housed a laser ‘spot-tracker’ that allowed Apaches to designate for each other-a procedure known as target handover. The laser spot-tracker allowed the TADS to slew instantly to where another Apache within the flight was looking, if you wanted it to do so, at the push of a button. It could also look for targets designated by ground forces. With so much laser energy bouncing around the battlefield, it was a wonder more people hadn’t been blinded in the one memorable conflict that had seen action by Apaches: when AH-64As of the US Army had decimated the tanks of Saddam Hussein’s Medina Brigade on the Basra Road during the 1991 Gulf War.

  The course continued to explore the arsenal in the kind of microscopic detail that I thought would only interest the boffins who’d designed it. Little did I know that the lessons Captain Paul Mason taught me would be put into vigorous practice and have me reading more and more just to stay one step ahead of the Taliban.

  In March 2003, while I took a break from the Apache to work on temporary assignment in Bosnia for SFOR (Stabilisation Force), George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their ill-fated assault on Saddam Hussein in response to intelligence, later known to be highly flawed, that Saddam was harbouring weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda insurgents. It was the start of a road that would eventually see us being assigned to the front line of the so-called War on Terror.

  THE KILLER

  1 SEPTEMBER 2003

  Middle Wallop

  The Apache instructors, some still sporting suntans from their US training, were eager to start teaching us, but my first flight was going to h
ave to wait. CCT1-the first Apache pilot’s course-was being paraded in front of the camera; the British Army loved a team photograph.

  Shuffling around in front of twelve, brand new, immaculately paraded Apaches were fifty-nine very proud people-the people who were busting their balls to get the Apache into service. With over half a billion pounds’ worth of assets behind us, the shot had to look impressive. With any luck, it would capture a team brimming with pride and confidence; never mind the fact that the road to initial operational clearance-the day that the Apache was declared fit for military ops-was still some way down the pike.

  While most of the group grinned like chimps, the twenty pilots of 656 Squadron were hoping that the camera would be far enough away not to pick out our faces in any detail. To have our mugshots printed in newspapers and glossy magazines could already prove fatal.

  The war against Iraq, in which George W. Bush had recently declared the United States victorious, had unleashed a storm throughout the Islamic world. A crew member of our deadliest attack helicopter was well on the way to becoming a highly valued target. The idea of being taken hostage and identified scared us all, but someone in front of me made light of it with a hilarious impression of our Taliban captor.

  Before any of us could fly, we had to go through several weeks of ground instruction. We covered every Apache system in great detail. It had hundreds; we even had to learn about refrigeration in case an air-conditioning unit failed at a critical moment.

  We were finally introduced to the sharp end of the Apache ‘capability matrix’ by the one and only Captain Paul Mason-basic revision of the complex world he had led four of us through the previous year.

  We began with the 30 mm Hughes M230 Automatic Chain Gun, the cannon, attached to the airframe in a fully steerable mounting beneath the cockpit. It could be operated by both crew members. By selecting ‘G’ on either cyclic, or the gunner’s left ORT grip, it automatically followed the direction of your sight-TADS crosshair, FCR target or, if you were in Helmet Mounted Display Mode, to wherever you were looking through the monocle. The computer calculated the necessary compensation for the speed of the Apache, wind velocity and drop of the shell during its time in flight; all we had to do was point it at the target and pull the trigger.

  The cannon was accurate up to 4,200 metres-over two and a half miles-but was most effective at less than half that distance. It fired ten rounds per second in pre-selected bursts of ten, twenty or fifty rounds-or, if we wanted, the whole lot in one go: 600 rounds a minute. Optimum effect-the ‘combat burst’-was set at twenty rounds.

  The shell was a 30 mm High Explosive Dual Purpose round, known as HEDP (pronounced ‘Hedpee’ by pilots) but commonly referred to as ‘thirty mil’ or ‘thirty mike mike’ by FACs and JTACs. Its shaped-charge liner collapsed on detonation to create a jet of molten metal that could cut through inches of armour. Fragmentation of the shell created its anti-personnel effect, but once detonated it also torched the target, making it devastating against buildings and vehicles.

  US experience had shown that if pinpoint accuracy was required and sufficient time available, the gunner should use the TADS as his sight. When time was a factor the helmet-sighting system was as effective, but with an increased spread.

  The stub wings of the Apache held ‘hard-points’ that enabled the helicopter to carry two air-to-air missiles and four underslung pylons for a range of weapon combinations, depending on the nature of the mission.

  One option was to mount four M261 rocket launchers-nearly seven foot long with their black rocket protection devices and carrying nineteen CRV7 unguided rockets each.

  We chose the CRV7-Canadian Rocket Vehicle-C17 rocket motor instead of the American Hydra 70 because it was faster. Being able to hit more distant targets gave us a better stand-off distance. It also had 95 per cent more kinetic energy at shorter distances and 40 per cent better accuracy too. It’s a fast spinning, fin-stabilised rocket motor capable of being fitted with and carrying several different warheads up to eight kilometres. They would go further, but we wouldn’t need to fire from more than five miles away, we were told.

  The most commonly carried warheads were the High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing (HEISAP) and the Flechette. The final choice was the Multi-Purpose-Sub-Munition, which Rules of Engagement (ROE) generally wouldn’t support. The MPSM-‘the death from above’-was a multi-purpose rocket, connected to the launcher by an umbilical cord that was hard wired to the weapons computer. It told the rocket how far to go before exploding above the target, whereupon nine bomblets-sub-munitions-would descend, slowed by a small Ram Air Decelerator (RAD) resembling a triangular yellow duster. As the sub-munition struck a vehicle its shaped charge would detonate, sending a high speed molten jet of copper through a tank or APC, killing everyone inside. The casing would also fragment on anything it touched.

  Each bomblet would fragment into scores of red-hot, razor-sharp shards of steel, travelling at 5,000 feet per second in all directions. The only warning the enemy would get would be a pop above them; by the time they spotted the yellow RADs, there would be no time to run, drive off or take cover.

  It was the perfect weapon for mounted and dismounted troops but had one serious drawback. On soft soil or sand, some would fail to detonate. To an unsuspecting child, the bright yellow dusters would act as an invitation to violent death or maiming. We couldn’t fire them without special orders, and even then we’d have to record the impact point and treat it as a minefield.

  The HEISAP-‘the beast’-was a kinetic rocket, originally designed to sink ships. Its nose contained a heavy steel penetrator that would drive through the hull. Once inside, a delayed fuse would ignite the high explosive, ripping the ship apart and igniting its incendiary charge, which would stick to the internal alloy structure and other materials; it wouldn’t take many to set off multiple inextinguishable fires.

  I thought of the fatalities aboard HMS Ardent, Sheffield and Coventry and the merchant vessels like Atlantic Conveyor and Sir Galahad in the Falklands. The majority of them burnt to death.

  The most fearsome of our three weapons, however, was the one that carried no explosive to its target at all: the Flechette rocket-‘the swarm of death’. Its warhead contained eighty tungsten flechettes, each dart weighing eighteen grams. Just less than a thousand metres after firing, a small charge would push two forty-dart cradles out of the nose of the fast spinning rocket. Centrifugal force would spread them into a conical pattern. A pair of rockets would suffice against most targets, but if we increased the distance we would need to fire more to ensure a kill, or ‘probability of hit’.

  A speed in excess of 1,100 metres per second would see the flechette impact at Mach 3.3 and enter an armoured personnel carrier with ease. Scabs of metal would peel off the inside of the armoured vehicle at high velocity with the contorted flechettes and kill its inhabitants outright.

  They travelled so fast that they created an intense vacuum behind them, an unseen and lethal void. In the open, a single five-inch tungsten flechette passing close by you would create a vacuum sucking the air from your immediate vicinity, and ripping muscle off bone. There was no warning that the swarm of death was on its way; it travelled way faster than the speed of sound.

  Our new CRV7 rockets were devastatingly accurate-except when the pods were misaligned. Over a range of 5,000 metres, they could spread over a kilometre; not what you’d want if your own troops were anywhere in the vicinity. We were searching for a way of making them align consistently but the solution hadn’t been found yet.

  It was the AGM-114 Hellfire missile system that had cemented the Apache’s reputation as an iconic, state-of-the-art weapons platform. The ‘Air-to-Ground Missile, HELicopter FIRE-and-forget’ had been developed for the Apache and its new Longbow radar. Five feet eight inches from nose to tail and weighing in at a staggering 105 pounds, it came in two different variants. The AGM-114K Semi-Active Laser, the SAL, four inches shorter and five pounds lighter, was guided onto
the target via the TADS laser, while the Radio Frequency (RF) worked in conjunction with the Longbow radar, which was less discriminating when it came to deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys on a complex, fast-moving battlefield.

  The SAL was our preferred option, for obvious reasons. Each weapon we fired would have to comply with the Rules of Engagement and I couldn’t see our government ever allowing me to fire at a target without seeing it physically.

  Whether fire-and-forget or laser guided, all Hellfires were equipped with dual warheads for defeating enemy armour. The first, ‘precursor’ warhead detonated micro-seconds before the main charge; both ‘reactive armour’-a layer of explosive bricks designed to detonate and destroy an offensive weapon before it could penetrate the hull-and outer skin would be blown off, making way for the full fury of the Hellfire’s main charge: a huge warhead capable of blasting any main battle tank into tiny pieces.

  If you fired the SAL missile without using a laser, it would simply hare off into the distance, searching for laser energy, until it ran out of juice and fell out of the sky. When the Apache’s laser was on-target and its energy could be seen by the missile’s seeker, it became a precision instrument. There were two ways in which to fire the SAL: in Lock-On Before Launch Mode-LOBL (‘lobel’)-and Lock-On After Launch Mode-LOAL (‘low-al’).

  In LOBL Mode, the missile was programmed to look for the correctly coded laser energy bouncing off the target while it was still on the launch rail. The moment the crew had confirmation that the seeker had acquired the target-whether it was designated by its owner, another Apache or a ground callsign-the gunner would release the Hellfire and it would fly unerringly to the desired point of impact.

  LOBL required the gunner to be able to see the target directly. This was all very well if it was relatively unsophisticated and unlikely to fire back at us. If, on the other hand, it was well defended, we could stand off at a greater distance; it had a range of over 8,000 metres and travelled at just shy of a thousand miles per hour.