Hellfire. Ed Macy

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.

       THE HUNTER

      At the end of 2001, Tommo fired out a questionnaire to all pilots in 9 Regiment: who didn’t want to do the Apache course and why? Surprisingly, not everybody was keen. I guess some thought, why do I want to go and learn all this new stuff, when I’m already at the top of the tree? The money’s coming in, the wife’s happy…

      Not me. I couldn’t wait.

      The first Apache arrived at Middle Wallop in the summer of 2002 and the list of those selected for the Apache Conversion To Type (CTT) course number one was posted in Regimental Headquarters. My name was on it. There were twenty-one pilots earmarked for CTT1, one of whom would be the new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Felton. So that left twenty operational pilots for 656 Squadron’s eight Apaches, enough for five flights: HQ Flight with the boss, Ops Officer and two QHIs, and four more, each manned by a flight commander, a specialist and two others.

      With two seats in each bird, the minimum they needed was sixteen; in other words, not all of us would make it.

      I knew that ten years’ flying experience didn’t mean I was a shoe-in. The Apache was an immensely complex machine to master; I needed to make myself indispensable. I had ticked the EW Officer box, but I had my eye on the Weapons Officer’s course. It could lead to the sexiest job in Army aviation: Squadron Weapons Officer-guns, rockets and missiles; right up my street-and the more I learned now, the better.

      Three of us from 656 were assigned to a bespoke Apache Weapons Officer’s course. My old mate Scottie would be there; he was going to become the Weapons Instructor for 673 Apache Training Squadron at Middle Wallop. It was billed as the most in-depth course we had ever attempted. If we managed to jump through every hoop, we’d end up advising on Apache weapons tactics to senior officers, teaching weapons and firing techniques to Apache aircrew, planning and running Apache live firing ranges, and designing and running Apache weapons missions in the Boeing simulators.