Blackhawk "Broken" Down

My new Priest Quorum assistant advisor is an Apache mechanic so we took the young men to the airport to see the aircraft for our Wednesday activity. Boys like fire. Boys like girls. Boys like weapons of mass destruction. We started off looking at the blackhawks which are primarily used for troop transport and insertion. They were cool, but we came to see guns and rockets. Sgt. Howard (our escort) taught us quite a bit about the aircraft:

• Apaches have three weapons systems - a 30 mm cannon with a 330 round capacity, 2.75 inch rockets with firing mechanisms on each wing and hellfire missles.


• The apaches are state of the art attack helicopters with a price tag of $16 million.


• The local base has 24 apaches and about a dozen blackhawks.


• Each hellfire missle (8 missle capacity) costs $40,000.


• For every hour of flight time, they perform three hours of maintenance.

Fun was had by all and we didn't break anything. No one volunteered for enlistment - we just like to look.

Darren holds a 2.75" rocket and I've got 30 mm cannon rounds.

30 mm cannon mounted under the front of the Apache.