Hellfire

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 have 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.

The LOAL Indirect Mode allowed the pilot or gunner to fire the missile from behind cover while relying on a third-party – a Special Forces team, for instance – to designate the target with their laser; a sneaky way of hitting the enemy without alerting them to the presence of clandestine forces. It could be fired in LOAL Low so it hugged the ground under a low cloud base or LOAL High so it could be fired over mountains too.

You would use LOAL Direct Mode-operated with eyes-on – if you believed the target to be in possession of laser-warning capabilities. To maintain the element of surprise you’d fire the missile, wait until the last possible moment, then lase the target a few short seconds from impact so the Hellfire would pick it up in its terminal phase.

We could also fire multiple Hellfires, one after the other, and simply move the crosshair from target to target.

In every case, when the seeker detected the correctly coded laser energy it forced the missile to climb as high as it could before slamming down hard on the target with as much kinetic energy as it could gain in the dive and exploding with a force of five million pounds per square inch. Even in poor weather – when the laser spot could be lost in cloud – its autopilot would correct its flight path to relocate the laser before impact. It was both devastating and surgical, which made it ideal for fighting modern wars – wars in which as many civilians as enemy were likely to be in the vicinity of the target.

The Apache was capable of carrying sixteen Hellfires in any combination of RF and SAL, although it was more likely to carry a combination of SAL and rockets. A typical mix would be eight Hellfires, four on each launcher, and thirty-eight rockets – a mixed bag of MPSM, HEISAP and Flechette – nineteen in each pod.

The moment I selected ‘M’ on the cyclic or ORT grip to action the Hellfires, the ‘missile page’ appeared on the MPD screen above my left knee, giving me a graphic depiction of their status. An R indicated a missile was ready in LOAL; a T showed it tracking the laser spot in LOBL. The same information was also displayed in the monocle.

At this point, the missile was ready to fire. I’d kick the tail rotor pedals, slewing the Apache left or right, a few degrees off centre – depending on which side of the fuselage the missile was to be launched from – ensuring that it didn’t fly through the line of sight of the TADS, its exhaust gases saturating and blurring out the DTV image or blinding the highly heat-sensitive FLIR camera. In the complex dynamics of the modern battlefield the gunner needed to maintain eyes-on the target right up until the moment of impact, especially with a missile that covered a kilometre in three seconds.

The news from the Iraq campaign had been full of harrowing details of civilian casualties and we knew we needed to do everything possible to avoid them.

Should a child or a ‘friendly’ suddenly appear near the laser spot on the target, at any point up to impact, all the gunner had to do was move the crosshair elsewhere and the Hellfire would readjust its flight path to intercept the new point of aim.

As I listened to Paul, I realised that the Hellfire lay at the centre of the Apache’s lethal, flexible weapon system.

After lessons each day, the four of us that had done the Weapons Officer’s Course were given additional instruction on how to teach what we had just been taught. It was a punishing routine, but I knew that I’d found the specialist role I’d been looking for. The machine’s full potential lay in its ability to deliver the Hellfire, rockets and cannon projectiles with pinpoint accuracy. Only by becoming the Squadron Weapons Officer would I be able to make good on the promise offered by this unique platform.