Hellfire

by Ed Macy

  With the PVC panels in place the rear cockpit door came down and I was plunged into total darkness for my first bag flight. Scottie flew us out to a disused military camp on Salisbury Plain-somewhere we couldn’t bump into anything, he told me reassuringly. The Pinvis was switched off and the engines were at full pelt. We were parked on a concrete square, around 100 feet by 100.

  ‘I can do this blindfolded!’ Reminding me of what I’d said time and time again over the past eleven years, Scottie continued to mock me. ‘Now you are. So let’s see, eh?’

  I stared at the symbology on my monocle-the only help I was going to get. Scottie wanted me to lift the aircraft ten feet into the air and hold it there. It sounded simple, but I had to do so without the tail weather-cocking and without drifting forwards, backwards, left or right. If I did drift, I had to correct it and reposition the helicopter over my takeoff point.

  The symbology would tell me if I was drifting. Instead of the normal crosshair, what I got now was a small circle. This represented the cyclic stick position. Sitting in the centre as it was now meant I wasn’t moving. If a line-a velocity vector-started to grow towards the top of the monocle, I was drifting forwards; to the right and I was heading to the right. All I had to do was move the cyclic between my legs in the opposite direction to the velocity line and it would return to its starting point; we would stop drifting. No rocket science there.

  In the meantime, the ticker-tape at the top of the monocle gave me my heading-something I could control with the pedals. Pushing down on the right pedal while allowing the left one out would spin me left, and vice versa. A scale running up the right-hand side of the monocle would let me know my rate of climb or descent and my height above the ground.

  Today was my first practice, but uppermost in my mind was the bag test we’d have to take in a few weeks’ time and the rules were the rules. If we drifted from the takeoff point, I’d fail. If I went above or below ten feet, I’d fail. If my heading changed, I’d fail. I had to go straight up, keep the Apache there and activate the position and height holds.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘how am I supposed to do all this on one eye?’

  ‘I guarantee you, as soon as you take off, the aircraft will go forwards or backwards, right or left and you’ll instantly adjust the stick in the other direction,’ Scottie said. ‘At this point you’ll drift the other way. Don’t worry about it-it’s natural. You won’t be able to keep it at ten feet and you won’t be able to keep it pointing in the same direction either. Prepare for sensory overload, Ed. You’ll drift all over the place. But when it comes to the test you’ll be able to do this-you’ll go straight up, hit ten feet and hover and you won’t move a millimetre. Remember, it’s not scary for me; only for you. I can see out. So, relax, don’t overcontrol, and try to take in as much as you can. Are you ready?’

  As ready as I’d ever be, I told him.

  ‘Okay, do not fly by your senses, use your symbology. Here goes. Maintaining three six zero degrees and the same position over the ground, I want you to climb to ten feet and put the holds in.’

  I raised the collective lever, applying power, and we began to lift clear of the ground. My right eye flicked between the circle at the centre of the monocle, the ticker-tape above it and my height on the right. I could see nothing else. It was like sitting on a hill in a car with a blindfold on and releasing the handbrake and not knowing what the fuck was coming at you…

  All three wheels left the ground and the line started to grow out from the centre, towards the right-hand edge of the monocle. I tilted the cyclic as gently as I could in the opposite direction. Too much. Fuck. The line shot out of the other side of the circle. So I overcompensated again. Then I realised my heading was off. I tried to correct with the pedals.

  I was stick-stirring and the aircraft felt like it was going all over the place.

  Between fits of laughter Scottie told me to put the holds in. I flicked the button on the cyclic in opposite directions engaging position and height hold as quickly as I could and the aircraft became rock steady.

  ‘Okay, Ed. Other than being at forty feet and facing north-east, where do you think we are?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ I felt drained. I’d probably only been airborne twenty seconds, but it felt like a lifetime.

  ‘How far do you think we are from the concrete?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somewhere near the top right-hand corner, maybe?’

  ‘Is that all?’

  My heart sank. It was worse than I thought. ‘Okay then, somewhere just off the top right-hand corner?’

  ‘How many feet from it?’

  I was getting bored with this game-and faintly irritated by it. What did Scottie want me to say? I’m a shit pilot? I’m not cut out for the Apache? ‘I don’t know Scottie-fifty feet, maybe. More…?’

  ‘Okay, Ed, switch on your Pinvis.’

  I did as I was told and the outside world suddenly flickered into life in my right eye.

  Jesus. I’d hardly moved. I had hardly moved.

  ‘We may not have moved,’ Scottie said. ‘But what were you doing wrong?’

  ‘Flying on instinct,’ I told him. Exactly what he’d told me not to do. When you flew by the seat of your pants, using all of your senses, you ended up all over the fucking shop.

  ‘When the velocity vector moves to the edge of your monocle, Ed, it means you’re only moving at six knots-that’s all.’ He paused. ‘Now I want you to use your bob-up box.’

  The bob-up box, another piece of symbology, would give me unbelievable situational awareness in my black void. It always stayed in exactly the same place in relation to the real world. It represented my initial position over the ground and would move accordingly; it gave me a point of reference-something I’d not had during my first foray into oblivion.

  He told me to switch off the PNVS and try it again.

  This time when I took off and the line drifted out from the centre I could see that the bob-up box had hardly shifted at all. Moving the bob-up box to the edge of the monocle represented a real-world shift of only six feet.

  ‘The lesson of the bag, Ed, is trust your symbology, not your instincts. If you end up with no vision, in the shit, with nothing else to rely on except what’s in your monocle, it’s symbology that will save your life-not your skills as a three-thousand-hour seasoned seat-of-the-pants aviator.’

  I heard what Scottie said, but could not envisage any situation a helicopter pilot might encounter that would emulate the conditions I’d just experienced in the bag: total blackout with no picture at all.

  On that score, however, I would be proved utterly wrong.

  Seven months down the line, with my bag test flight behind me, I was back at Dishforth. Sixteen out of the twenty of us earmarked for 656 Squadron who’d gone to Middle Wallop were in the briefing room; 9 Regiment had its first Apache Squadron.

  It had been a long, hard road. Wives, girlfriends, children and friends were all happy to welcome us back. The army had expected everyone to pass CTT1-it was just a conversion course, after all-but the Apache had proved a very difficult beast to master. The lads that failed each had over 2,000 military flying hours-and worse still, we’d lost our QHI.

  The rest of us knew all too well that all we had done was learn how to keep the thing airborne and make sure it was pointing in the right direction when it fired its weapons. We were now about to embark on an even more punishing course: CTR-Conversion to Role.

  We’d be spending many more weeks away training. Even in barracks the average day lasted fourteen hours. To work a long day was one thing; to be in an aircraft or simulator as complex as the Apache was quite another.

  During one night sortie, my front-seater and I were working so hard we became target-fixated. The red mist came down because the target vehicle, a recce car, was moving so unpredictably. Pat was doing everything he could to get a steady crosshair on it, but it was proving incredibly tough. Our cannon rounds always landed
just in front of the vehicle. Just as we fired, the bloody thing changed direction. By the time the rounds had flown to the predicted position the vehicle wasn’t there.

  Eventually, we closed to within a thousand metres. Then we heard a huge bang and the seat punched up into the small of my back.

  The aircraft lurched dangerously and plunged nose-down. The world was spinning at such a rate I couldn’t make sense of the swirling green; attempting to pull out was proving more difficult than I’d anticipated. The nose started to come up but the Gs were getting worse; the Apache began to spin within its own circumference. I’d lost tail rotor authority; I was out of control. There was only one outcome to this and I prayed we would survive it.

  As the Apache passed through 500 feet, the low height warner started beeping loudly and the lamps in front of me glowed bright. The airframe was vibrating so badly I couldn’t focus.

  Then the monocle went black.

  It was dark outside the cockpit. I glanced down at the MPD to see we were passing through 200 feet with a 4,800ft per minute rate of descent. Eighty feet per second with enough ammunition on board to win a small war. The MPDs cut out as we lost all electrics. I was now totally blind. I didn’t know which way was up. I knew we were coming up for impact so I grabbed the coaming to brace myself and prayed.

  The seat crunched into my spine and the windows bloomed bright red.

  Total silence…

  The silence was broken by a voice in my headset: ‘Ed, Pat, that will be a re-fly. See you both in the debriefing room in ten.’

  Thank fuck we’d been in a simulator.

  The instructor debriefed us on our performance. We had become so engrossed in trying to kill the recce car that we had flown too close to the enemy. A guy with a shoulder-launched SAM-7 had shot us down. The missile had hit us just aft of the engines and taken out the tail rotor. The blast had pitched us forward and the loss of tail rotor authority had given us the spin. Keeping the speed on could have helped us regain control, but it was hard to want to keep flying fast when you were only a thousand feet up, and pointing straight at mother earth. Pulling up had slowed the aircraft’s speed, but then I’d lost the tail altogether.

  My only saving grace was that I had managed to level the aircraft before impact.

  Would I have survived?

  Yes, but not without some back surgery-and I didn’t want to go there again. Had we crashed at or less than 3,660 feet per second I could have walked away unscathed. The Apache was the most survivable helicopter in the world. Pilots had crashed at multiple G levels and walked away without injury. The cockpits were guaranteed to maintain 85 per cent of their original shape in an impact.

  Would my front-seater have survived?

  Probably not. Pat’s face would have ploughed into the ORT, the metal tube that jutted out of the coaming in front of him.

  I felt embarrassed. Both of us should have been aware of the proximity of threat. I was working so hard just flying the aircraft aggressively to keep us on target I’d had no spare mental capacity. I’d become saturated and then I’d drowned in what they called my ‘ability reservoir’-a reservoir I was beginning to realise was more of a puddle.

  Pat had been trying so hard to hit the vehicle with the cannon that he’d been unable to process any other information. We’d both had classic target fixation and the direct result had been loss of situational awareness.

  So, we had failed the sortie-a sortie that had been flown in a simulator. Strike one on CTR. What was interesting about this, when I managed to get past the humiliation, was that I’d grabbed the coaming in a bid to diminish the impact of…well, nothing; it was just a simulator.

  I found out later I was not alone. The Apache simulator was so good that you forgot where you were within seconds of taking off. When you were in it, you really did think it was the real thing.

  A year earlier, things had kicked off in Iraq. British troops stationed in and around Al-Amarah had found themselves locked in a brutal insurgency war. Armed with AK47s and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), the followers of Muqtada Al-Sadr had been in almost continuous contact with British Army troops since April 2004.

  Things were also beginning to hot up in Afghanistan, where unrest fomented by a reconstituted Taliban-supposedly defeated in 2002-was beginning to destabilise the nascent democracy of Afghan president Hammid Karzai. To keep the peace, Britain had recently announced that it was due to send several thousand more troops to supplement the thousand or so it already had in-theatre.

  It added fresh fuel to our efforts to master the Apache in all its complexity. I was appointed as the Squadron Weapons Officer-the SWO. My workload doubled overnight.

  CTR saw us learning how to conduct single-ship ops in the Apache, then two-ship ops-flight missions-then finally whole squadron operations. The squadron, led by our OC, Major Black, was split into three flights and a Headquarters Flight, with two Apaches each. We formally completed CTR on 16 September 2004 and were awarded our Initial Operating Capability (IOC).

  The IOC allowed us to deploy four Apaches to a semi-permissive environment for recce and strike but warned the government that we were unable to sustain any prolonged operations. As significant a milestone as it was, we were a long way from being combat-ready. We still needed to integrate with the rest of the British Army and the wider services.

  From October onwards we exercised with everybody, starting with the RAF on Combined Air Operations. During ComAOs, Apaches and RAF combat jets learned how to mount escort missions for Chinooks, the RAF’s principal transport helicopter. We practised convoy protection missions-keeping watch over the life blood of logistics support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The first six months of 2005 we exercised with 16 Air Assault Brigade, the troops ready to deploy to any hot-spot at a moment’s notice. After a particularly gruelling exercise Lieutenant Colonel Felton gathered us together and announced that we had achieved TFAD. The Task Force Availability Date meant we could now deploy as a regiment to conduct operations in support of other units, but under the kind of restrictions that would take a brave government pen-pusher to sign off.

  Soon afterwards we joined HMS Ocean off the coast of Northumberland for a couple of weeks of ship-borne takeoffs and deck landings. In late summer we joined it again off the south coast. We had learned how to fly to and from HMS Ocean in the North Sea; this visit was about learning how to fight from her. Over a month we flew numerous sorties from the helicopter support vessel to the Castle Martin weapons range in Wales, where we carried out attacks in representative combat conditions against targets on the ground. There wasn’t a firing range big enough in the UK to safely accommodate the range envelope of the Hellfire-but we shot off just about everything else.

  We felt we’d got about as close as we could ever come, short of a real shooting war, to mastering the beast. As it turned out, this was just as well.

  Lieutenant Colonel Felton had been briefed on the likelihood of our going to Afghanistan. In October, he was pretty much certain. As the weeks marched towards Christmas, it became the worst kept secret in the army.

  With our short Christmas break behind us, the CO confirmed that 16 Air Assault Brigade had received orders to deploy to Afghanistan in support of the Afghan government. Along with 1310 Flight from RAF Odiham, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps was to form part of the Joint Helicopter Force (JHF) in support of the legendary 3 Para battlegroup.

  The JHF would consist of eight Apaches and eight Chinooks; our brief was to provide four of each per day to whoever needed them, plus a couple of Lynx for good measure.

  We were already gelling with 16 Air Assault Brigade. Our problem was that we hadn’t live-fired with them-and we hadn’t so much as seen a live Hellfire, let alone found somewhere big enough to fire it.

  And we were due to deploy in May-just five months away.

  DUSTY HELLFIRE

  Our imminent deployment changed one very significant aspect of our operations. Up until now we had been conc
entrating our training in the low-level environment. At less than a hundred feet off the deck we were an extremely hard target to hit. It didn’t matter if we were two Apaches or a formation of eight Chinooks and eight Apaches-we blasted across the European landscape as fast and as low as we could.

  If someone had wanted to shoot us down they would have been hard pressed. The ground clutter-villages, towns, hedges, trees, woods and forests-would mask our arrival and departure both visually and audibly. By the time we were spotted or heard, we’d be gone. That, at least, was what the manual said-and we now had no reason to doubt it.

  We received our briefings on Afghanistan in early January and were given our Area of Responsibility (AOR): Helmand Province-the lawless badlands in the south, the last known hideout of Osama Bin Laden.

  We would be operating in a barren wasteland-the Dasht-e-Margo, or Desert of Death. The vast majority of our work would be carried out in this environment, but we were also likely to operate in the mountainous north. If we operated low level out there we would be seen from miles away and have nowhere to hide.

  Then we got our threat brief.

  Supporting 3 Para’s battlegroup would entail escorting Chinooks into and out of austere locations laden with men and materiel. We would also be responsible for protecting the Paras should they get into any trouble. John Reid, the UK Secretary of State for Defence, had just visited Afghanistan and announced to the world that everything was going swimmingly; that 16 Brigade would probably be in and out of the country without firing a shot. Needless to say, anyone with a modicum of military experience ridiculed this statement. We hoped for the best but trained for the worst.

  The Taliban, Al-Qaeda (AQ) and the HIG-the Hezb-I Islami Gulbuddin-were not known for their willingness to cooperate. We were briefed that there was a distinct possibility they would stand their ground and fight. Their easiest target-one that would cause the greatest amount of casualties for least effort-would be to shoot down a Chinook stuffed full of Paras. The unholy triumvirate knew that sending body bags home would sway UK public opinion against the war and hoped, in turn, that this might persuade Blair’s government to withdraw from Afghanistan.