Ed Macy - Hellfire

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 the 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?’