Raining down live Hellfire at South Korean range

PYEONGTAEK, South Korea — Apache helicopter crews carried out an important training stint Friday in which they launched live Hellfire anti-tank missiles at a target range off South Korea’s west coast.

Fifteen Apaches from the Army’s 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade took part in the live fire over Chikdo Range, an island cliff that juts out of the West Sea about 20 miles west of Kunsan Air Base. The training was scheduled to begin March 10, but fog and yellow dust grounded the helos until the end of the week.

“This is one of the very few times they actually get to fire real Hellfire missiles,” brigade spokesman Capt. Brad DeLoach said in a telephone interview several days before the shoot. “It’s a familiarization shoot for the guys,” he said. “Most of these kids have never fired a Hellfire unless they do it in combat.”

“A lot of guys don’t know what it feels like coming off the rail, looks like or sounds like on impact. … A lot of times on the simulator, it’s very anticlimactic,” Chief Warrant Officer 2 Dan Archer said Thursday.

“When you get in the air and you’re actually shooting the real missile — knowing you can’t do anything to mess up — you can’t replicate that,” noted Capt. Ashley Lee, while waiting for weather to clear at Kunsan on Thursday.

The Hellfire missiles, which cost $20,000 to $25,000 each, are built to destroy tanks.

The brigade, headquartered at Camp Humphreys, is part of the 2nd Infantry Division. Its Apache battalions fly the AH-64D Apache variant, known as the Longbow. The two-seat aircraft is armed with a 30mm chain gun and can be fitted with 2.75-inch rocket pods, up to 16 Hellfire missiles, or a combination of rockets and Hellfires.

Counting ground crew and other support troops, some 350 of the brigade’s soldiers took part in the training, which was staged out of Kunsan.

Apaches armed with three or four Hellfires each lifted off from Kunsan in flights of two, making a 20- to 30-minute over-water flight to Chikdo. There were no manmade targets the crews had to hit on the range; they were instead free to fire at any piece of terrain they chose.

They fired at altitudes below 500 feet, DeLoach said. “They’re gonna go and engage rocks — just terrain — there’s nothing out there to shoot,” he said.

While one pair of Apaches was en route to the range, another pair was heading back from its shoot.

On returning to Kunsan, the Apaches rearmed and refueled. Some were used to practice a “hot swap,” a quick change of crewmembers that takes place while the engines are kept running.

If an Apache crewmember became incapacitated in combat, the helo could land, the disabled crewmember could be taken out, and a fresh crewmember could quickly take his place, allowing the Apache to quickly return to action, DeLoach said.

The Apaches were from the brigade’s 4th Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment. In addition, two CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters and a UH-60 Black Hawk of the brigade’s 3rd Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment joined the training as a personnel recovery element, DeLoach said.

“Their mission is, if an Apache goes down in the water, they’re to pick [the crew] out of the water,” DeLoach said.

Laser and radar depending on variants.

The development of the Hellfire Missile System began in 1974 with the US Army requirement for a “tank-buster”, launched from helicopters to defeat armored vehicles. [1]. Production of the AGM-114A started in 1982. The Development Test and Evaluation (DT&E) launch phase of the AGM-114B took place in 1984. The DT&E on the AGM-114K was completed in Fiscal Year (FY)93 and FY94. AGM-114M did not require a DT&E because it is the same as the AGM-114K except for the warhead. The early variants were laser guided with recent variants being radar guided. The Hellfire has matured into a comprehensive weapon system capable of being deployed from rotary- and fixed-wing aircraft, naval assets and land-based systems against a variety of targets.

Hellfire II, developed in the early 1990s is a modular missile system with several variants for maximum battlefield flexibility. Hellfire II’s semi-active laser variants (AGM-114K high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT), AGM-114KII with external blast frag sleeve, AGM-114M [blast fragmentation], and AGM-114N metal augmented charge [MAC]) achieve pinpoint accuracy by homing in on a reflected laser energy beam aimed at the target from the launching platform. Predator and Reaper UAVs carry the Hellfire II, but the most common platform is the AH-64 helicopter gunship, which can carry up to sixteen of the missiles at once. The AGM-114L, or Longbow Hellfire, is a fire-and-forget weapon: equipped with a millimeter wave (MMW) radar seeker, it requires no further guidance after launch and can hit its target without the launcher being in line of sight of the target. It also provides capability in adverse weather and battlefield obscurants. Each Hellfire weighs 106 pounds, including the 20 pound warhead, and has a range of 8,000 meters. As of late 2007, some 21,000 Hellfire IIs have been built since 1990, at a cost of about $68,000 each.

The Joint Common Missile (JCM) was to replace Hellfire II (along with the AGM-65 Maverick) by around 2011. The JCM was developed with a tri-mode seeker and a multi-purpose warhead that would combine the capabilities of the several Hellfire variants. In the budget for FY2006, the US Department of Defense canceled a number of projects that they felt no longer warranted continuation based on their cost effectiveness, including the JCM, although some military and industry sources have produced data showing JCM is the most cost-effective way of adding performance on a timely basis across multiple platforms to meet projected threat growth. A possible new procurement for a JCM successor called the Joint Air to Ground Missile (JAGM) is under consideration. Due to the U.S. military’s continuing need for a proven precision-strike aviation weapon in the interim until a successor to the JCM is fielded, as well as extensive foreign sales, it is likely the Hellfire will continue to remain in service for many years to come.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire

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