Wishful thinking. A military helicopter, domestic terrorists everywhere
“The chances of hitting a moving helicopter at 1K ft. even with a semiautomatic rifle must be very, very small...just as possible that this was a random shot...” [PUGACHEV, post 8]
“Wishful thinking. A military helicopter, domestic terrorists everywhere” [albie, post 14]
“1000 ft is just 334 yards. A car is easy to hit at that range and a chopper is way bigger than a car. Even at full speed you just have to lead a few feet in front of it.” [This_Dude, post 17]
“Thought that pilot and cabin ground facing portion area was armor protected to prevent any smaller calibers like 30’s bullets penetrating that area. If not they should be. Report didn’t disclose bullet size.” [mosesdapoet, post 27]
“I wouldn’t say just hitting an target as large as an military helicopter isn’t hard...A thousand feet is very doable...Hitting it with the idea to bring it down is another subject...” [RedMonqey, post 43]
The helo was at an altitude of 1000 ft, according to the news story. Probably means 1000 feet above mean sea level. No information on the slant range because no one knows where the shooter was: left? right? in front? behind? We don’t yet know.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104464/uh-1n-iroquois/
UH-1Ns don’t fly very fast: a little over 100 mph at cruise. They’re still faster than the average automobile. Judging the velocity vector of an object in flight is very different from judging speed and direction of a ground vehicle, even at comparable ranges to target.
Target detection, identification, tracking, point-of-impact prediction, and gunlaying are complex tasks: quite a ways beyond “leading a few feet.” Purely manual training of antiaircraft guns was on the way out by the latter part of World War Two. Today, the military establishment doesn’t bother to train even its top shooters at that task: it’s tricky enough with a mounted machine gun, to say nothing of a hand-held rifle firing one bullet at a time. Fire-control computers and guided missiles have pretty much taken over the anti-aircraft mission.
UH-1N isn’t expected to encounter hostile fire so it probably lacks armor. The weight and performance penalties are so severe that nobody puts armor on any aircraft unless it’s really, really needed. Applies five times over for rotary-wing aircraft.