Ed Macy - Hellfire

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.

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.