Hellfire

LEARNING TO FLY-LEARNING TO FIGHT

The day of my first flight started like any other – in one of the lecture rooms of the facility that had been built especially for the Apache at Middle Wallop. After a month of theory, we were ready to put our new knowledge to the test. We were also ready to meet our instructors. Mine turned out to be Scottie, whom I’d been friends with for over a decade and with whom I’d shared many sorties over the Emerald Isle, flying patrol support during the Year of the Sniper.

‘Helloo, Ed!’ He breezed into the lecture room. ‘Are ye ready to go flying?’

I tried to pretend that it was no big deal, but Scottie wasn’t having any of it. ‘Och, come on, Ed, you’re allowed to show a little appreciation. You showed me the ropes in Ireland; now it’s my turn. You’re going to love this – I guarantee it.’

The lucky bugger had spent a few months learning to be an Apache instructor in the wide open spaces of Alabama, flying sorties from Fort Rucker after finishing the Weapons Officer’s Course with me last summer.

We walked into one of the specially revamped hangars. Twelve Apaches lay waiting under the arc lights, each with only a few hours on the clock. The tips of their rotor blades were rigid and interleaved to make the most of the available space. Scottie gave the nearest a reassuring pat on the nose. ‘I don’t think there is anything I could tell you about this that you don’t already know,’ he said.

I grinned. ‘I could build one in my garage if you gave me the bits.’

He curled his finger and beckoned me to follow him. We walked around the stubby wing on the right-hand side of the aircraft and paused beside the fuselage. I was finding it really hard to remain calm.

What never failed to impress was the sheer size of the Apache; the mighty Chinook that could carry fifty-five troops in the back was only a little over two feet longer than this two-seater. It was twice the length of a Gazelle and considerably bigger in volume. Up close, it was angular and ugly. The hangar was enormous, but getting twelve in was like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle.

My mouth had gone dry.

Scottie pulled himself up onto the wing. I jumped up, too, and watched over his shoulder as he opened up the cowling that shielded one of the two RTM322 engines and demonstrated how to inspect the oil levels – one of the pilot’s many duties before takeoff. Satisfied, he proceeded to check that the intakes were free from obstructions and then opened up the gearbox inspection hatch on the wing, just forward of the engine intake.

Back on the ground, he opened up the access panel on the back of the wing that contained some of the communications equipment. We then walked down to the tail and checked the stabilator – the aero-foil wing that sat horizontally below the tail rotor. It was locked and secure, as was the tail wheel below it.

The inspection continued up the port side. Finally, standing on the top of the Apache, above and behind the pilot’s cockpit, I watched Scottie spin the radome, perched on the main rotor hub, over sixteen feet above the grey-painted concrete floor.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re doing?’ I said. ‘I am here to learn.’

‘Och,’ Scottie tutted, ‘you don’t want to be fussing yourself over stuff like this. Not today. Today is for flying, Ed.’ He pointed a manicured finger at his wrist, gesturing for me to take a look at the latest addition to his watch collection. ‘Though according to Mr Breitling, we’ve time for a spot of lunch first.’

I was about to voice my frustration when Scottie, knowing how much I wanted to get airborne, put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Climb down, Ed. Everything in its own time. This wee machine isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be ready to fly after we’ve eaten.’

By the time we returned, the ground crew had towed all twelve gunships onto the pan. Protected by an imposing razor-wire fence, they were accessible only via a set of electronically activated gates designed to accommodate an Apache with room to spare.

They were arranged in two rows of six, their noses pointed inwards like prop forwards about to lock heads in a scrummage. I handed my camera to another student, a guy called Pat Wiles, and asked him to snap away. As I shook Scottie’s hand I felt like I’d been preparing for this moment all of my life.

Scottie showed me how to swing myself into the cockpit using the grab handles in the cockpit roof. For today’s flight I was in the back seat, which was stepped up to give the rear-seater – the pilot on a normal sortie – visibility over the gunner’s head.

When I’d pulled on my bonedome, Scottie showed me how to adjust the monocle. Then, after running rapidly over the cockpit layout, he jumped into the front.

After closing the cockpit and going through our preliminary flight checks, I fired up the auxiliary power unit, a small gas-turbine that supplied juice to the aircraft when it was on the ground. A faint hum was quickly drowned out by the rush of the air conditioning. In front of me, screens and displays burst into life.

By following the procedures I’d become familiar with in the simulator, I bore-sighted myself to the aircraft by aligning my monocle with the BRU on the coaming in front of me.

I threw the engine power levers forward and the blades began to turn.

After a further round of systems checks, Scottie asked whether I was ready.

I’d been ready ever since he’d first bloody asked me.

The Apache was nearly seventeen feet from wing tip to wing tip, but its undercarriage track – six and half feet – was relatively narrow. Scottie warned me that this, coupled with the heavy FCR above the main rotor head, made the helicopter feel unstable while you were taxiing.

I told him I was good to go.

‘Right,’ he said in my ears, ‘we need to pull in a little power. Thirty per cent torque will do.’ He reminded me to look for the ‘ball’ – a solid circular graphic, bottom centre in my monocle. If it was to the left of its kennel when we were on the ground we were leaning to the left. It also acted like a conventional slip indicator in the air.

I lifted the collective lever slightly with my left hand, increasing the power. The Apache began to vibrate. Everything looked and felt good. I checked the monocle: in the top left it told me the RTM322 engines were reaching 30 per cent.

‘Okay, that’s enough power now – you’ve got sufficient induced flow to move the aircraft.’ Induced flow was the downwash generated by the main blades. Pushing the cyclic tilted the rotor disc forward. I could feel the Apache straining to be released.

‘Raise your visor,’ Scottie said.

‘Why?’

‘I need to see your face while you’re taxiing.’

I glanced up. His eyes were watching mine in the little vanity mirror above his seat.

‘Okay, Ed. Brakes off and remember to keep her bolt upright. If she leans left move the cyclic to the right. Push the cyclic forward to go faster and back to slow down. Got it?’

‘Sounds simple enough, Scottie.’

I glanced down to place my feet on the very tops of the pedals.

‘Don’t look down, Ed!’

‘Okay, mate, keep your hair on.’

I rotated the tips of my toes forward and the parking brake handle released with a loud clunk.

I pushed the cyclic a bit more and we started to roll forward. Suddenly, I started to panic. The helicopter felt like it was about to fall over.

I could hear Scottie laughing.

Ahead of me the yellow line curved to the right in a large sweeping arc towards the huge gates and safely away from the Apache parked in front of me.

‘Right, I want you to release the tail wheel – but, remember, be careful.’

I looked down for the button on the collective.

‘Don’t look down, Ed. One more sneaky peek and I’ll mark you down for not knowing your controls.’

I’d spent weeks learning where they were but I didn’t want to make a mistake and push the wrong button.

‘Sorry, Scottie. It’s nerves. Mate, I’m afraid to fuck up.’

‘Relax, Ed. This is the easy bit. You must learn where things are instinctively. It’s for your own good. Wait until you do the bag.’

‘What exactly is the bag?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough. Now, just concentrate on taxiing this thing because you need to follow that line.’ He paused. ‘So unlock the tail wheel.’

Making sure I didn’t look this time, I pressed the appropriate button on the collective. Immediately, and to my enormous surprise, the tail weather-cocked rapidly to the right.

Whoa!

‘I have control.’ Scottie’s voice was reassuringly calm. ‘You’ve got too much left pedal in. There’s your first lesson.’

I cursed under my breath. Jesus. The power of this thing…

‘You’re overcontrolling. With the tail wheel released you have to use the pedals to keep the aircraft straight and the cyclic to keep it upright. Try again.’

I tried to follow the painted yellow line on the concrete that led towards the gate posts, but it was impossible. I’d never flown a helicopter with wheels before – the Gazelle had skids.

‘Where are you going?’ Scottie asked, as the Apache weaved precariously either side of the line. I was zigzagging all over the place. It was worse than my first driving lesson.

The line was now pointing straight towards the gates but I still couldn’t follow it.

‘Okay,’ he said after several more seconds of this torture. ‘I have control.’

I felt terrible. I’d never known anything like it. I was worried that I’d never get the hang of it.

Scottie plonked us bang on the line and manoeuvred the Apache between the gates and lined us up on a piece of taxiway called the ‘keyhole’ because that was how it looked from the air. It was designed to allow you to take off into wind whichever direction it was coming from.

‘I’m not teaching you this bit, Ed. Just sit back and enjoy it.’

With that, Scottie pulled up on the collective. There was a thunderous noise of downwash as the blades coned upwards, battering the air into submission. For a brief moment, as the two power plants fought to provide the torque that the Apache needed, I became aware of just how massive it was. And then suddenly we were airborne and accelerating skywards.

As I looked back over my shoulder, I saw Pat tracking us with his camera. I had no doubt my taxiing efforts would be enjoyed by all that hadn’t flown yet well before our wheels were reunited with terra firma.

Over the next two months, I learned how to tame the beast. One of the hugely innovative things about the Apache was the degree of automation built into it. Early on, I was taught about ‘holds’ – how you could punch a hold button and maintain the aircraft’s position over the ground in the hover, or its heading, or its speed, or height or a particular rate of turn. There were so many things you needed to stay ahead of in the cockpit that being relieved of the necessity to fly at certain times really helped to shoulder the load. Soon, I was climbing, descending, turning and doing climbing and descending turns.

I learned to master the MPDs – the TV screens that obviated the need for the Apache’s cockpit to be littered with the dozens upon dozens of instruments and dials of its forebears. In fact, the only ones that were common to the US AH64A were four tiny standby instruments in case all of the electrics failed; everything else was requested by the pilot as a page on an MPD. Over 5,000 different information pages could be stored on the computer and displayed on the MPD screens. Learning how to navigate our way through them was like grappling with a new Windows-type software program and we had to know it instinctively. It was the same with the knobs, switches and buttons. There were 227 of them in the cockpit, but most had at least three different modes or functionalities, giving us nearly 700 positions and over a thousand permutations to remember.

We also had to master the monocle. As well as targeting and flight information, it could also display FLIR imagery beneath the data to allow the pilot to see at night. This was all well and good. What wasn’t so good was what they called ‘monocular rivalry’ – it was by far the trickiest task I had ever had to learn.

Basically, your right eye stared at a small glass plate less than an inch from your cornea. Your left eye, meanwhile, was looking at the real world – which could stretch from your cockpit instruments to infinity. Bringing either the left or right image into focus was fairly straightforward, but trying to see both clearly at the same time seemed impossible.

Ever tried it? Which one wins?

The fact was: neither did. Each eye fought the other for supremacy in the brain, threatening to split my head apart. But then, one day, the headaches stopped; my eyes and brain had discovered how to work together. Slowly, I was becoming a part of the machine.

I learned how to do field circuits, hovering, navigation, autorotation and running takeoffs and landings. I then found out how the Apache performed on limited power – i.e. with one engine out. I practised manoeuvring in and out of confined areas – much trickier in this big machine than it had been in the Gazelle – and how to land on a slope; again, not easy in a large helicopter that had narrow wheels for an undercarriage rather than skids.

Finally, I was taught quick-stops, wingovers and high-g turns at max power and performance; how to get to height fast, how to get down fast and how to turn hard.

Then, as 2003 became 2004, it was into the part-task trainers and the simulator again to continue learning how to turn our knowledge into practice. The position and function of every switch and button was supposed to be intuitive by now; as natural as drawing breath. The instructors drilled us hard on this point. The simulator had very little light during this phase and we soon found out why. Everything we’d done had just been a prelude to flying ‘in the bag’.

Flying in the bag did not equate to anything I’d ever done before. During my early sorties in the Apache, I’d noticed Velcro strips around the interior of the cockpit. It turned out that they were to hold big black PVC panels over the clear perspex canopy for ‘bag flights’ – flights in which the student pilot was immersed in darkness. With the PVC panels in place no light entered the rear cockpit. Our only reference to the external world would be via the monocle and the feed from the instruments; the FLIR and the PNVS would be turned off. The thought of flying in the bag terrified me.

It didn’t matter what we’d achieved up till then, if we failed the bag, we’d be out.

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.