Hail A-10 & down with the Apache!
Couple-week-old Slate article:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081906/
“So here’s a suggestion for Donald Rumsfeld: Deep-six the Apache, and restart the A-10.”
Here’s a suggestion to EA. Hire Hollis and restart that A-10 sim!
Woohoo, sign me up for this petition! I LOVE the A-10.
Well, at some point this year, LOMAC will be out, and it will have an A-10.
Loyd Case
Dude, I worked on A-10 as a summer intern. It was state of the art… in 1998!
Trying to resurrect that project is almost as silly as trying to make a Falcon 5.0 out of the ripe carcass of Falcon 4.0.
Yeah, I saw that a few days ago and thought the same thing. It is too bad about the Longbow. When we were flying LB2 who knew that it would come to this? I imagine some intrepid gaming house is going to risk doing a study of an A-10 sim. At least it won’t require air-to-air AI, which ought to take some of the weight off dev time. I guess we won’t see another chopper sim for a long while.
In fairness to the Longbow, the mostly tabletop-flat deserts of Iraq are not exactly its ideal operating environment. The Longbow needs some rolling terrain–or at least some trees–before it’s really in its element. Helicopters excel at using difficult terrain to their advantage; they fare less well when hovering ten feet above the ground means that they can be spotted from forty miles away.
That said, I also like the A-10, and would love to see a good A-10 sim. My fingers are crossed for LOMAC…
Well, at some point this year, LOMAC will be out, and it will have an A-10.
Loyd Case[/quote]
Already have my copy pre-ordered, my friend. ;) I’ll also be spending some time with it at E3 in a couple of weeks <drool>.
Am I the only one who thought this was a BF1942 Desert Combat thread?
I spent a few years of the early 90’s as an Apache crewchief. The desert is a nasty place for a helicopter, considering the fine particulate sand (brown talcum powder basically) that gets into everything - so you’ve got a killer maintenance headache before you ever see combat.
That being said, the designed role of the AH64 was to operate in wolfpacks inside hilly forested terrain and fight a leapfrogging withdrawal battle. It’s not a close air support aircraft, nor is it meant for sugical strikes. It’s meant to face columns of armor, rip a couple of missiles at the front of the group to slow their advance, disappear and pop up again in the backfield. Repeat.
Optimal engagement range is 3-5 kilometers, preferrably from behind a hill or treeline. In a flight of 4, there is hopefully an OH58D up ahead to lase targets. Failing that, emplaced infantry with laser designators will pick targets. The Apache would ideally not need to unmask to engage. Failing that, one of the flight should bob-up and acquire – then feed their target data to the TDCs in the other ships. Remask, launch, and then shift position 30 degrees to one side or the other while falling back to the next good firing position.
The failures in Gulf War II are thus:
No forward air controllers present
There is nothing to mask behind, therefore you’re taking fire and have no place to go. Hope you can jink well.
Desert terrain is a complete assraper at night with night-vision goggles on, since you have no perception of depth and there are no terrain features to provide situational awareness of altitude. This is further complicated by the PNVS being a monocle design - so only one eye can see at night, the other is looking at blackness or the interior of the cockpit. You have -zero- depth perception, and that doesn’t encourage fancy evasive flying. Also, the Apache’s radar altimiter fires directly out the bottom of the ship, and if you’re banked more than 20deg you aren’t going to get an altitude reading other than “sea level reference”. So, your guages are worthless.
Optimal engagement is 3km or more. When the Apaches got hit, they were almost directly over the enemy. Let’s call it < 1km. That’s bad news when you can’t hide. PNVS is not a thermal scope, so the pilot couldn’t pick out tanks and bodies out there in the darkness. You’re going to want to fly PNVS instead of TIALDS because the field of view is a lot better - TIALDS is magnified and it’s like looking down a paper towel tube and trying to fly. CPG could be using it though, but probably wasn’t because…
Apaches aren’t meant to be sent in massive wave attacks across open terrain. That’s totally inverse of common sense doctrine. The more birds you have in the air at night, the more you have to exercise caution in not running into each other. Once the shooting starts, odds are quite high that if you dodge you’ll ram into a buddy. Apache’s are meant to transit the battlefield in COUNTOUR flight, which is about 50-70ft alt. However, due to terrain issues they were probably at more like 20-40ft, which is NOE mode. So, considering that you’re flying in a 20’ box with other choppers to each side of you, there’s 90% of your attention spent flying and 10% spent looking for targets.
So, with all those factors contributing to them flying low, slow, and blind it was just pure bad luck that they should happen to cruise over a massed concentration of troops. The fact that most of them could even fly back to base after that is both a miracle and testament to just how hard an Apache is to kill.
Basically this was the army equivalent of trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer.
What about Kosovo then?
I’m hearing that many Apache defenders say the Gulf War II poor showing had quite a bit to do with poor management decisions. While that sounds like a common finger pointing tactic, I do agree with Azurom’s points and would give that argument some credit this time. Remember that the Apache was successful in Desert Storm, and contrary to its mission as described by Azurom’s post, did perform missions of surgical strikes and close air support. It’s not hard to believe that someone got a little overconfident and “tried to use a screwdriver as a hammer.”
Good post. My only experince with Apaches is through books and playing Longbow and Longbow 2 (and Gunship 2000, if you want to reach WAY back), but even I know that wide open, flat desert terrain is not a good place to be if you are a Longbow pilot. It’s bizarre that the Army tasked them in this manner; sort of like sending a column of tanks into a rice paddy and then complaining when they get stuck.
We’ll never know, as the Pentagon more-or-less refused to use them there.
One thing to note that after that disasterous Apache raid early in the war, the Army quickly changed tactics. Yeah, bad shit happens in war, but a sign of professionalism is that you learn quick and don’t do the same mistakes twice. You just make new mistakes :)
Anyway, they noted a few tactics the Iraqi’s used for that ambush of the Apaches.
For one, signals intelligence determined that the Iraqi’s were using cell phones to track the Apache’s forward progress. They had no radar warning, but they just had guys on the front lines, and when they heard the Apaches fly over, they called their central HQ. When the Apaches flew over the next guy with a cell phone, he called it in. Very Black Hawk Down-like raid warning system.
The Iraqi’s then shut down all the power to a town, killing the lights. The Apache’s were lured in close, and when the lights were switched on, that not only was the signal for everyone to open fire, but the Apaches were so close that they were also illuminated by the lights.
After that raid, the Apaches started using more standoff tactics, and I bet that the Air Force probably started going for cell phone nodes and towers.
But yeah, Apache was designed for combat in Germany or something that actually has terrain features, like canyons or valleys and hills and trees and forests. If you’re hovering 30 feet over the desert, there is no place to hide. It’s all flat, and there’s no trees to duck behind.
The irony of this is I remember after Gulf War I, all the pundits were predicting the death of the tank and the rise of the helicopter as the new aerial tank.
As for Kosovo, there’s a lot of blame that still goes around over that. From what I heard, the blame was on the defense budgets of the time. Army pilots were getting shit for flying hours, and then suddenly they needed to get proficient in night flying in really rugged terrain, so they did a crash course (no pun intended). But that’s where they got in trouble, and an Apache slammed into the ground and the crew was killed.
But yeah, it didn’t help that the Pentagon was seriously dragging its feet on the issue. Clark was screaming for ground troops and permission to escalate the air campaign with Apaches, and the Pentagon and White House were doing everything to avoid risking American ground forces and helicopters. Unfortunately, this half-assed way of waging war was totally ineffective, and it wasn’t until Clinton and NATO grudgingly came to the realization that they had to have the realistic threat of inserting ground troops into the equation did the Yugoslavs yield.
I don’t have anything new to add, except that this is turning into a great thread. Thanks for the input IXAszurom and Woolen Horde.
You’ll also note that the Apaches did an exemplary job in the Panama campaign. The mountainous jungle stuff down there was prime realestate for the birds.
I think the Army just got a little overconfident in how far they could push beyond the designed mission boundaries. Think about when you played Longbow2 - they’d shoot a missile at you, you’d pop a flare and dump the collective to duck behind the hill until the missile flew overhead. These guys didn’t have that option, so they had nothing to do but “weave a lot, shoot a lot” and try to get out of there.
Side note of interest – Go rent the Nicholas Cage/Sean Young movie Firebirds. This isn’t what I’d call a good movie, or a good movie about helicopters either… in fact the only thing saving the film is that I’m in it. All of the airfield scenes were shot at Ft Hood’s Grey Airfield. The hangar they’re in is the middle of three. The one to the right of it is a Lockheed Martin depot facility, and the one to the left belongs to ATB (Apache Training Brigade). All the scenes where people are working on helicopters in the background are D Co. 1/24th AHBn. A B and C were flight companies, D was phase maintainence - and that’s where I was, because being in a flight company SUCKS. On any other bird, being crewchief meant you got to fly every day. Being an Apache crewchief means that from 6am when they take off until 6pm when they get back, your ass is picking up cigarette butts, buffing floors, or anyting else they need “idle folks” to do. Mine was a 9-5 job, hehe.
Anyway, we’re all in the background at various points in the movie. Also of note is that if you look at the briefing room scene there is a briefcase on the conference table. There’s a sticker on the lid of the briefcase of a skull with a cobra wrapped around it - text is too small to see but it says 1/24th Viper Squadron. Dates back to 'Nam or so. Anyway, it’s my roommate’s briefcase. They needed one, walked into the shop and saw his and thought it was really neat - so it became a movie star.
PS - Sean Young has an uber nice ass in a tight green nomex flight suit.
i have to admit, i thought the apaches in gulf war II were an embarressment to the us army, but explaining the problems with flying in the desert and how they were sucker-punched by the iraqis makes it seem more a higher level stuff up more than anything else.
do either of you two have any (publicily available) information on how that apache got grounded (and thus captured by the iraqis) - was it the dust storm they supposedly flew into, or did the pilots panic, or some combination of the two - and why didn’t they start their engines and take off again after the storm had passed (if they’re able to do that)?
I don’t have any info on it… but my suspicion, considering the pristine condition of the chopper we were shown, was hydraulic failure. The BUCS system gives you about 30 seconds of backup control in the event of a hydraulics failure - varies with how much you’re moving the controls too. So, you can lose the whole system and still put the bird down if you’re quick about it. You don’t have a lot of choice where though.
We didn’t get much of a look at the tail boom area, just the nose of the bird. The hydraulics system is below and behind the engines, at the point where the tail joins the main airframe. If it’s going to vent, it’ll either be out the middle of the tail boom, or out of the rear belly of the main body.
What I can guarentee is that it didn’t have an avionics failure. We only saw the right side of the bird on TV, but the right FAB (forward avionics bay) was untouched. It’s the dominant side, and the left is backup - so you can blow the left side of the chin off and still fly anyway. I didn’t see anything but a few small-arms scuffs on the kevlar - not enough to punch any holes in the computers. We also didn’t see the blades very closely - and if a 23mm or better shell clipped a blade-tip off, that would induce enough vibration to make them set it down - but they’d have probably picked a better spot for it. Possibly the tail rotor drive shaft - but that’s a 4 section titanium tube so it couldn’t have taken a hit that severed it completely, otherwise it would have made like nunchakus and whipped the whole tail off.
So, I’m calling it a hydro hit - it’s about the only “magic bullet” shot an Apache can take that won’t leave a giant hole as evidence of why it went down. I’d also say probably just a very unlucky mechanical failure and probably not the direct result of ground fire.
I assume now that the US forces have taken over Baghdad they will have already recovered the downed Apache(s) ?
I thought it was just one, and that it was intentionally targeted and blown up by allied forces shortly after it was lost. I would be very surprised if they didn’t.