by Ed Macy
We expected to have the following weapons fired at us: small arms (SA), machine guns (MGs), heavy machine guns (HMGs), rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), anti-aircraft guns (AA), and Man Portable Air Defence Systems (ManPADS)-shoulder-launched SAMs. Any one of these was more than capable of shooting us down if we stuck to the low-level environment.
If we operated above what was called the ‘small arms band’-the expanse of sky where SAs, MGs, HMGs and RPGs were deemed effective-we would go a long way to reduce that risk. The Apache’s HIDAS would take care of any SAMs. AA guns were the only remaining threat, but they were extremely difficult to operate, used up lots of ammunition quickly and were hard to maintain. Lack of training and practice since the Russian invasion also meant they were unlikely to be used effectively. It didn’t take a genius to decide that flying at altitude would be the safest option-but the big questions still stood: could we fulfil the mission? Would we be able to get through the small arms band safely and do our job at altitude?
As a young Para I learned the art of shooting down helicopters and slow aircraft on Salisbury Plain by practising on target drones. We were shown how difficult it was to hit one if it varied its velocity, azimuth and elevation without warning. And while instructing Air Comat Tactics from 1998 to 2003, I demonstrated how to change direction, altitude and speed to throw off the hostile gunner. The trick was to swiftly recognise the threat.
We flew to Thumrait Airfield in Oman-where it was suitably hot, desiccated and mountainous-for the month-long Exercise Desert Eagle.
Billy was my instructor for dust-landings. We had bumped into each other on a number of occasions since my Basic Rotary Wing Course at Wallop. He’d been to the Apache academy in America before instructing on CTT1, and we were privileged to have him as our Squadron Qualified Helicopter Instructor (SQHI). He was very open and had the knack of getting the best out of people. ‘If you’ve done something wrong, if you’ve made a mistake, don’t hide it,’ he used to say. ‘Chances are, if you’re doing it, others might be too. You’ll be dealt with, but you won’t be punished; and you might just save someone’s life.’
When he wasn’t flying helicopters, Billy drove his Lambretta come rain or shine. If his life had been a movie, it would have been a cross between Blue Thunder and Quadrophenia, with a soundtrack by The Jam.
To perfect a dust-landing, Billy explained, we would need to employ what he called a ‘zero-zero’ technique: to reduce speed and height simultaneously in a steep approach, and to avoid rolling forward by reaching zero speed and zero height at exactly the same time. We had to trust our symbology because we would lose all external references in the final stage. Dust-landings would be like ‘the bag’ on speed.
We gave it a spin the following morning. Billy warned me it was going to be alien and uncomfortable, quite unlike anything I’d done before. The dust and sand would disorientate me; if I didn’t focus 100 per cent on the symbology, I would crash. If I got distracted, I would lose all sense of my position relative to the landing zone. Any drift would end up, at best, with the Apache rolling onto its side, and thrashing itself to pieces. At worst, we might end upside down.
No pressure then.
Billy took the reins and selected a solitary rock in the otherwise featureless landscape to land beside. It scared the shit out of me. Forty feet up, I couldn’t see a thing outside the window and my PNVS had gone as blind as I had. I only knew we were down when there was a thump as we hit the ground firmly on all three wheels. When the dust cleared I could see he’d parked the Apache right next door to it.
‘Happy with that, Ed?’
‘You must be having a laugh. I want to see you do that again to make sure you weren’t using the Force…’
Billy fancied himself as a bit of a Han Solo, but he shook his head. ‘Stop being a wuss.’ He grinned. ‘Your go.’
Second time around he talked me through the final 100 feet.
‘Concentrate on the symbology and digital readouts, Ed. Watch your speed and height readouts and keep them coming down in tandem. You need to make constant cyclic, collective and pedal adjustments to maintain an accurate countdown. We can’t afford to come into the hover or have any speed on when we hit the ground.’
Righty-fucking-ho…
Then, suddenly, it was like a bad day out with Lawrence of Arabia.
‘I’m losing all references, Billy.’
‘Me too, mate. Not a drama. Just hang in there and concentrate on the symbology. Passing forty-six feet, keep driving her forward…keep driving her down…I’m totally blind now…’
It was a fucking nightmare out there. I forced myself to focus on the velocity vector, heading and height in my monocle rather than the dust cloud billowing around us.
Billy’s calm voice helped me to stay in the zone.
‘While maintaining your scan on the heading and height and using control inputs, watch the symbology. Look at the velocity vector, Ed.’
The velocity vector-the line that told me my speed and direction of drift-edged back towards the centre circle in my monocle.
‘Keep it coming back towards the middle, but do not let it move out to the side. If you do, we’ll roll over. Keep bringing the velocity vector back using the cyclic and the height down with the collective. At the same time, keep an eye on the heading tape and adjust the pedals to make sure she doesn’t turn off heading. We’re getting into the ground cushion now, so force it down with the collective and keep her moving forward with the cyclic, constantly reducing the rate on both. You okay?’
I couldn’t see a fucking thing outside. ‘Five feet to go…’
‘Critical time, Ed…Any drift and we’re crashing this thing.’
Bloody marvellous.
I felt a bump as the Apache’s struts absorbed the impact.
‘And we’re down,’ Billy said as if we’d done nothing more arduous than reach the ground floor in a lift.
We sat stationary as the dust began to dissipate.
‘You’ve just got to trust your symbology, Billy,’ I said with newfound bravado.
Billy laughed. ‘Easy, eh?’
‘Easy enough, despite the last fifty-odd feet being totally blind.
‘Okay, smartarse, where’s the bloody rock, then?’
The air had now cleared sufficiently for me to have a good look around. I couldn’t see the bloody thing anywhere. We took off again and spotted it some distance from our wheel marks on the desert floor. I’d landed about forty feet too long.
‘If that was a landing point, you’d have missed it. It’s okay here, where there’s miles and miles of nothing, but if that was the only place to touch down-if it had any obstacles or worse still other aircraft around it-we would have crashed. Now let’s see how easy it really is when you have to touch down somewhere a little smaller than the Oman. I want you to land right next to the rock this time. Let’s go.’
An hour or so later, I was still at it. Each landing got harder and harder. I began to hit my spot, but had to pull away before touching down or we would have crashed. I could land okay elsewhere, but doing so where I wanted to in a dust storm proved to be ninja.
It took every last ounce of mental ability and skill I’d ever been blessed with to land next to our rock, but I managed it in the end.
When day turned to night, I had to do it again. I knew that darkness wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the shit conditions, but I still found myself hesitating. Billy rammed home the point. ‘Ed, it doesn’t matter if it’s daytime, night-time or the world’s turned pink. You’re blind the second you get into dust, and we fly by symbology alone. Got it?’
Now I knew why we’d spent so long flying the bag.
‘That’s right, mate. If you can’t pass the bag, you can’t land blind. Simple as.’
‘And they say the conditions here are a peach, compared to what we’re going to get in Helmand.’
‘Want to give it another go?’ Billy said.
It was one thing to be shot down by th
e Taliban, quite another to die by my own hand. I didn’t want that on my tombstone; and I didn’t want it on the tombstone of the other guy either-the guy I’d be flying with.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just to be on the safe side, let’s give it another go. One more for the road…’
We were confident that we could now get safely from the desert floor to altitude and back, but could we operate there?
We fired the cannon and rockets on the ranges outside Thumrait with the FACs so they could get used to calling in Apache fire. We practised firing from altitude instead of low level until we became proficient at the new height.
After each session, I viewed every inch of gun tape and debriefed the crews on every rocket and just about every round they fired. I did this in more detail than they’d ever wanted, but it was worth it; our accuracy improved dramatically. It was all a part of my responsibility as the squadron’s Weapons Officer and it was one I took extremely seriously. After two weeks of nothing but cannon and rocket firing we were hitting targets first time, every time.
The main event, however, was yet to come.
One of the principal reasons for coming to the Oman was to launch the Hellfire. There simply wasn’t enough space on any UK proving ground to accommodate the weapon’s danger-area envelope.
I was very proprietorial about the Hellfire. Call me obsessive or compulsive-which some of my mates were starting to-but I saw it as a make or break. We’d fired rockets and cannon for nearly two years to get to this standard, but we had one shot to get the Hellfire right. We’d trained in the simulator for hours but now we would actually fire it for the first time. And since each weapon cost the equivalent of an Aston Martin or a mid-range Ferrari, I wanted us to get it right.
The Air Manoeuvres Training and Advisory Team oversaw our instruction. AMTAT were a bunch of senior instructors with expertise in multiple disciplines who were there to see that the Apache was worked up to its full fighting potential prior to being declared fully operational. They’d been teaching us since we started CTR and now hovered around us like bees around flowers, keen to collect every bit of data they could from the Omani experience.
When it came to weapons training-and the Hellfire, in particular-they were all over us like a rash. They wanted to make sure that we could do our job, and that the missile did what Lockheed Martin had said on the tin.
The AMTAT opted for the lottery approach. They wrote down every conceivable way of firing the Hellfire on a series of cards that we of 656 Squadron then drew.
Each of us had to fire two missiles apiece and because Billy and I were qualified to fly in both seats-front and back-we were told we would have to swap. It was all about getting ticks in boxes. I had to fire from the front seat and so did Billy.
The cards were spread out on a table. The firings would range from the hover to 140 knots, from low altitudes to extremely high. We would fire autonomously and we would fire remotely; we would fire single missiles and two at a time-two in the air at once, from the same aircraft, at two separate targets. We would also fire some in LOBL Mode, and others using LOAL Direct, LOAL Low and LOAL High. We would go through the whole sequence by day; and to cap it off, we’d repeat it all by night.
This was to be the culmination of two and a half years’ training, two of which were spent under the guidance of the UK’s greatest attack pilots. The stakes were high; no one wanted to miss with an £82,862.08 missile. And the coppers on the end weren’t an accounting error; the bean-counters had worked it all out, down to the last penny.
I drew my cards and was given two missiles to fire and three missions in which to destroy three targets.
My first was a maximum range, high-level, autonomous daytime shoot against a small building with the Apache at maximum speed.
My second was to fire a missile by night as a pair of us ran in at 100 knots with an FAC lasing the target.
My third was to gather another crew’s missile in mid-air and kill an armoured personnel carrier at night while maintaining a high altitude hover. This tactic was straight out of Paul Mason’s weapons lecture, to be employed if I was out of missiles and could detect a target equipped with laser warning receivers. By the time the LWRS alerted the APC crew to the threat, the Hellfire would be one second from impact. Goodnight, Vienna.
Becoming increasingly less popular with the crews, I ran through every engagement technique in detail.
The following morning we flew out of Thumrait Airfield for the weapons range, ninety minutes away. A selection of old vehicle hulks and the odd building-our target ‘sets’ for the next few days-were the only notable features in the otherwise barren landscape.
We set up our tents, cooked some food and sat around under a full moon shooting the shit.
‘You’ve something on the bottom of your shoe, Simon,’ Jake said.
Simon lifted his heel and dropped his shoulder and was instantly embarrassed.
‘Ooh, hello sailor,’ we chorused.
Simon was a navy exchange officer. Being the only matelot among us, he was always getting stick-but dished it back with interest.
‘You’ll all get AIDS, you know,’ he said.
‘But only if you mess around,’ Jake waved an admonishing finger.
We rolled around laughing.
‘He means Apache Induced Divorce Syndrome, Jake,’ Billy said. ‘You catch it from being on operations or exercises for the duration of your flying career.’
‘I’ve nothing to worry about; my wife is used to me being away at sea. But you Pongos are prime candidates,’ Simon said. ‘Not that you need any help from the Apache. You seem to be doing a fine job of it all by yourselves. Isn’t that right, Billy?’
Billy had just been on a romantic holiday with his wife. When they got back his car had been nicked. What upset her was that he’d left his house keys and the address in the glove box. Their insurance wouldn’t pay out for any losses.
I was next in the firing line.
‘I think Ed’s a prime candidate, after his performance at the Mess Christmas ball. What do you reckon, Jonny?’
Being officers, Simon and Jake hadn’t yet heard about this. Jon quivered with excitement at the prospect of a fresh audience.
‘Picture me, Billy, Ed and the wives sat around a large table with wine waiters and silver service waitresses pampering to our every whim…’ He was now positively wriggling with pleasure. ‘Ed, ever the gent, pulls back Emily’s chair just as she goes to sit on it. She falls flat on her back; her legs shoot up above the table and she wallops her head on the wall.’
My cheeks burnt bright red as the hilarity increased. She’d looked like she’d been in a car crash-her dress ripped so high she could have auditioned for Spearmint Rhino.
Jon’s eyes sparkled. ‘I reckon Ed is more likely to get AIDS if he stays home than if he disappears for months on end.’
Jake came to my rescue by telling a story about ‘Bus Stop Jonny’. Jon-being ginger-was always being accused of stinking of piss, hence the nickname.
Which, predictably enough, brought the ribbing straight back in Jake’s direction. He was no stranger to this. As a young lad with a wife and his first baby on the way, no one got as much stick as Jake-at least partly because he could take it on the chin and chuck it back in buckets. Jake was from an affluent family and was brought up in Antigua; his relaxed Caribbean outlook sometimes made it hard to believe he was legally allowed to vote, let alone fly an attack helicopter. He got the nickname Floppy at Sandhurst, for being a ‘fucking laidback overseas person’-and the piss-taking didn’t stop when he was awarded the Sword of Honour.
As dawn broke, we watched our ground crew load four Hellfires onto our aircraft. Billy and I inspected our missiles and gave the machine a thorough walk around before saddling up.
We picked up the FAC’s transmission as we crossed into the range.
‘Apache, Apache, this is Bravo Two Zero. Firemission, over.’
‘Bravo Two Zero, this is Outlaw One. We are a flig
ht of two Apaches-callsigns Outlaw One and Two-with eight Hellfire missiles on board. Ready for Firemission, over.’
The FAC came back loud and clear. ‘Firemission…Target grid: Four Zero Quebec, Charlie Hotel, Seven Zero Eight, Zero One Eight.’
After a brief pause, he continued: ‘Target elevation: Four Five Eight feet…Target Description: Small building.’
Another pause: ‘Friendly forces: Three thousand seven hundred and twenty-five metres south…
‘Laser code: One, One, One, One…’
And his final call: ‘Read back, over.’
I’d punched the grid and altitude data into the computer with the keyboard on my left as he spoke. When he finished I pressed the ‘slave’ button on the ORT. I found myself staring at a ten-foot square building on the TADS.
I read back the Firemission: ‘Firemission; Four Zero Quebec Charlie Hotel, Seven Zero Eight Zero One Eight, Four Five Eight feet; small building; friendlies Three Seven Two Five metres south; Laser One One One One. Over.’
‘Correct. Call when visual. Over.’
Bingo. The guy was good.
I’d done this in the simulator loads of times. I replied to his last message immediately. ‘Outlaw One is visual. The target is a small building to the north-west of an east-west track with one building to the south of it and one building to the north of it.’
‘Correct. Your building is the middle one. Call when ready. Over.’
I’d now identified the FAC’s location-in a trench with about fifteen other guys, south of the target.
‘Ready.’ I’d already locked up the target with the Image Auto-Track (IAT). The missile was spun-up and ready on the rail.
I lased the target and the FAC called: ‘Clear hot.’
Distance was 8,225 metres away and counting down fast. We were at 5,000 feet and Billy was doing nearly 140 knots.
The LOBL box appeared in my monocle and I knew that the missile could now see the laser energy reflecting off the target.