‘You could, sir. Surely…’ The sergeant looked down at his computer. ‘One moment.’ His face began to redden. ‘Oh, he’s not there…’
‘Make your fucking mind up, man!’
After a few frantic keystrokes, the screen changed. ‘Er…here he is at the start, sir, next to the other Gazelle Hotel Two Zero Alpha-see.’
Tommo leaned forward. ‘Then what?’
The sergeant tapped away furiously, running the battle at warp speed. The icons began to move. They both examined the screen in minute detail, then Tommo turned and gave me a look designed to kill.
‘Well fucking well. You both disappeared together, in fucking unison, the second you got into the exercise area.’
I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking I’d switched off the boxes and gone black.
I needed to get to grips with this, and quickly. ‘Why did we disappear?’
‘I’m just checking, sir,’ the sergeant replied nervously. ‘Oh, there you go. Someone deleted you shortly after you took off. It must have been an accident. Lots of callsigns were lost at the same time, see…’ He pointed at the monitor. ‘We must have forgotten to load you back on with the others.’
At the debrief that followed, I realised that Tommo was impressed by what we’d done. I also knew that he was going to be the last to admit it.
Soon after I got back to the UK I heard that 9 Regiment Army Air Corps would be the first unit to take delivery of the Apache, slated for arrival in September 2003, a little less than three years away. I called Major Tucker, my course leader on grading, who was now the OC of 656 Squadron and asked him if he’d be willing to have me in his squadron.
‘You’re welcome in Six Five Six,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be here when the Apache arrives, and I don’t have the final say-so on this one, Mr Macy.’
‘Who does?’
‘The CO,’ he replied. ‘From what I can gather, Colonel Thomson is handpicking the Apache crews personally.’
My heart sank. After our run-in at BATUS, I couldn’t see him accepting me in his regiment in a million years, let alone selecting me for the Apache programme.
I called 9 Regiment’s only other Apache designated squadron Officer Commanding to hedge my bets. Tommo would be gone by the time 664 Squadron did the Apache conversion course. If I couldn’t get into 656 as an Apache pilot perhaps I could go that route. OC 664 told me that the crews would be handpicked from the regiment and anyone not selected would have to do a Lynx
conversion course. If I didn’t get selected for Apache, I would end up on Lynx and that would end my SAS quest.
From 1998 onwards, I decided I’d amass so much indispensable knowledge about attack helicopters that the Army Air Corps would have no choice but to select me for the Apache when it eventually entered service. I began by reading up everything on attack helicopters I could find. The next part of the strategy was to get myself on an Air Combat Tactics Instructor’s (ACTI) course.
A helicopter, by its very nature, is a vulnerable machine. Unlike a combat aircraft, it cannot rely on speed to get it out of trouble over the battlefield. The policy of the British Army, which did not own a dedicated attack helicopter force, was for its pilots to avoid trouble if they possibly could. This entailed remaining covert-flying down in the weeds-or remaining at ‘stand-off’ engagement ranges: attacking tanks outside the range of their offensive weaponry.
But with the Apache it would be different. The Apache had started life as part of a very exclusive club. Before the Berlin Wall fell, there were precious few attack helicopters in existence. The Soviets had developed a fearsome machine called the Mil Mi-24 Hind and the Americans had developed the Apache and the Cobra. There were other attack helicopters on the drawing board or in development when the Wall fell, but these three were the only ones that mattered.
With their enormous defence budget, the Americans bought the Cobra and the Apache in large quantities. Other less prosperous NATO nations had opted instead for machines like the Lynx, the Gazelle and the German BO105.
The first Gulf War brought things into sharp focus. The utility of the Americans’ Apaches quickly became self-evident. In the aftermath of the conflict, NATO nations began to accelerate their attack helicopter plans and numerous competitions were launched across Europe to determine the best machine for the job. The Apache began to find itself in contention with the Eurocopter Tiger and new developments of the Cobra. But it had been massively updated, too, from the ‘A’ model that first entered service with the US Army in the 1980s, to the ‘D’ model, which was equipped with the new Longbow radar system.
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 without 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.