Apache Read Online Free PDF Page B

…’
    It took some time, but eventually we became an item and have been together ever since. Emily’s forces background was both a good and a bad thing. It meant she knew the pressures of military life, and to expect long periods of separation. It also meant she knew the real risks of military flying, and the chances of me not coming home.
    The British Army’s much hyped attack helicopter programme had been in the pipeline for years. In 2002, it finally came online.Of course I had to be on it. It was the closest I could ever get to being in the front line again. I bent every rule in the book to make sure I was posted onto the very first Apache conversion course and Emily didn’t try to stop me. Before I got there, I read up everything I could about the amazing new machine.
    The Apache AH64A was initially designed by Boeing for the US government in the 1980s for the giant battlefields of the Cold War. The Pentagon wanted something to take out Soviet armour the moment it rolled across the West German border.
    Following the US military tradition of new aircraft honouring Indian tribes, the Apache was not just the next generation attack helicopter. It was the hunter-killer supreme for all future wars. Its surveillance capabilities far outstripped anything its predecessor the Bell AH1 ‘Huey’ Cobra had, and its destructive capability was without precedent.
    It looked very different to any previous attack helicopter too. The smooth aerodynamic curves and contours of the Sixties and Seventies were replaced with the hard angles and mean edges of the very first anti-radar – or stealth – technology.
    It was also larger: 49 ft 1 in. from the tip of its nose to the back of its tail, with its rotor blades reaching a further 8 ft. It stood 17 ft 6 in. tall and 16 ft 4 in. wide, and weighed 23,000 lb fully laden – 10.4 tonnes, or 140 fully grown men.
    Its angular shape wasn’t the Apache’s only stealth quality. It had four rotor blades rather than two, allowing it to turn at half the speed – five revolutions per second – and thus with half the noise to generate the same lift as the traditional two-bladed helicopters like the great thumping Hueys of the Vietnam War. Each blade’s high-tech design made the aircraft quieter still. Instead ofhammering the air like the Chinook, Apache blades sliced through it, giving the gunship its trademark low-pitched growl.
    It also gave off the lowest heat signature of any helicopter built. Though the engine burned fuel at 800 degrees celsius, a powerful cooling system meant you wouldn’t even burn your hand if you pressed it against the exhaust. That seriously hindered a heat-seeking missile’s ability to track it. To mask more heat, its skin was coated with special paint that reflected less light too.
    When incoming fire did hit the Apache, its ingenious design meant it could withstand a remarkable amount of it – including a 23-mm high explosive round. A US Apache in Iraq even once took a direct hit from a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, shredding its starboard engine and wing and leaving its rotor blades in tatters. It still managed to return fire, kill its attackers and make it back to base.
    What went on inside the aircraft was cleverer still. Thirteen kilometres of electric wiring linked the avionics, engines, visual aids and weapons systems run by a myriad of on-board computers which monitored every tiny electronic pulse.
    Most impressive of all the Apache’s cutting edge technology was how it found its prey. Its Target Acquisition and Designation Sight system was made up of an array of cameras housed in a double-headed nose cone that looked like a pair of giant insect eyes. Its 127-times-magnification day TV camera could read a car number plate 4.2 kilometres away. At night, the thermal camera was so powerful it could identify a human form from a distance of four kilometres, and spots of blood on the ground from a kilometre up.
    Then there was the Apache’s punch.