Hellfire. Ed Macy

Odyssey, the HIDAS’s (female) Voice Warning System (VWS) would alert the crew to any given threat. The information would also be displayed on one of the two multi-purpose displays; there were two MPDs in each cockpit-TV screens used to display flight, critical mission data and targeting images. Imminent threats-prioritised at any given moment-were displayed in positions relative to the aircraft.

      It was probably inevitable that the VWS had already earned herself a nickname: Bitchin’ Betty.

      Before I could ‘graduate’ from the course, I had to take an exam-and it wasn’t your average GCSE. We were to mount a national evacuation operation from an island-whose geography resembled Sicily-embroiled in civil unrest. Some Brits had been taken hostage. I was the commander of a force tasked to fly in, free them and fly them out.

      Using the knowledge I’d amassed over the previous few months, I decided to mount an operation using Apaches, EA-6Bs, a B-2 Stealth Bomber and a C-130.

      I jammed the island’s surveillance radars with the EA-6Bs and sent in the Apaches to take out the coastal radars. The B-2, so stealthy that it was largely invisible to radar anyway, then dropped a stick of satellite-guided 2,000-lb Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs on the command centres. Amidst the chaos, Special Forces were airdropped in to rescue the hostages. Once they had safely ex-filtrated the danger zone, I sent in the C-130 low level over the sea, chaperoned by Apaches, to airlift them out.

      I now had an intuitive feel for how EW could master the battlefield. Although it wasn’t a dedicated EW platform-unlike the EA-6B-the Apache was stuffed with so much electronic wizardry that it would enable the Army Air Corps to do things with helicopters it had never dreamed of before.

      I did my EW instructor’s course in early 2001. With the arrival of the first Apaches in-country, there was a buzz about our quantum leap in capability. Even though I’d only ever sat in one once, nearly ten years earlier, I felt I was really beginning to know this machine, to understand how it worked.

      I began a war of attrition on 3 Regiment’s Adjutant to get posted 200 miles further north, to Dishforth in North Yorkshire, the future home of the Apache. He wasn’t up for it and neither were the pen-pushers in Glasgow, but bull-headed perseverance finally got me within reach of the man I’d last crossed swords with during the finale of BATUS, Lieutenant Colonel Iain Thomson.

      On the day of my interview, I popped in to pay my respects to the commander of 656 Squadron, who tipped me the wink that Tommo was in ebullient mood; he was still riding high on the news that his regiment had been selected to receive the most important piece of kit the army had procured in years. But while CO’s interviews were scheduled to last twenty minutes, I’d be lucky to get ten.

      I knocked on his office door. There was a growl from within and I entered. Tommo barely glanced up as I snapped a salute.

      ‘Sit down, Mr Macy,’ he said. ‘Still bending the rules, are we?’

      I said nothing, just prayed he wasn’t going to fob me off with a Lynx conversion course.

      Tommo got up from behind his desk and strolled over to the window, hands behind his back. This was it: Win or lose time. I had to make every shot count.

      I took a deep breath and told him what I’d been up to in the months since I’d last seen him, what I’d learned at every level of my recent training, and the ideas I’d developed about Air Combat Tactics.

      There were moments when he responded as if I was talking Swahili, but when I finally shut up his eyes shone. A week later I was making a PowerPoint presentation to the boss of Joint Helicopter Command (JHC), an amalgam of all the helicopter activity undertaken by the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Three days after that I ran through the presentation again for the Director of Army Aviation.

      We ended up with a plan to establish a ‘purple’ ACT Instructor’s course; a course with a dual objective-to teach pilots of unarmed helicopters like the Gazelle and Chinook how to get into a furball and survive, and to teach gunship pilots the new world order.