High stakes for Iraqi airspace

FOR United States and British Chinook helicopter crews in Iraq the drill is now second nature. Whenever they take off, a crewman leans over the helicopter’s tail ramp with one hand gripping a M60 machine gun and a control to trigger decoy flares in the other hand.

At the front of the giant helicopter’s cargo cabin, another crewman adopts the same pose out of the right-hand door.

It is the crewmen’s job to watch out for the distinctive smoke trails of any surface-to-air missiles. If they see these deadly threats they can instantly trigger their defensive system that fires flares, which will hopefully decoy the heat-seeking missiles away from their helicopter’s hot engines. They also have to watch out for rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire.

Take-off is always the most vulnerable moment for the helicopter crews, because their machines have yet to build up the speed and gain the height needed to allow them to manoeuvre out of any trouble. RAF and US army Chinook crews in Iraq have been on high alert against small, portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, known in military jargon as "Manpads", since earlier this summer when Iraqi resistance fighters started firing them at US Hercules transport aircraft landing at Baghdad airport.

While the Manpad threat is taken very seriously, a bigger problem in Iraq’s urban areas are unguided, rocket-propelled grenades fired at hovering helicopters. These are thought to be responsible for the loss of an Apache gunship in June and a Blackhawk helicopter last weekend.

The danger posed to helicopters by a salvo of rockets fired from high-rise buildings has haunted American helicopter crews since the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia in 1993.

So far, the US military has not confirmed how its Chinook was lost yesterday, but it will be very worried that its reliance on helicopters could be called into question. The US army has used helicopters heavily since the Vietnam war but in Iraq their importance has grown because of the guerrilla threat to vehicle convoys.

Each day there are dozens of ambushes and bomb attacks on US truck convoys throughout the deadly Sunni Triangle area. Up to now helicopters have provided the US army with the means to move men and people around Iraq in relative safety. Senior commanders and visiting VIPs are always flown around Baghdad to avoid being ambushed in the Iraqi capital’s clogged-up traffic.

US combat units rely on helicopters to move them on their daily search-and-destroy missions mounted in the Sunni Triangle.

One way to provide added protection to its helicopters would be for the US army to avoid dangerous daylight missions and use their hi-tech night vision systems. This is particularly likely for routine missions by the Chinooks to move troops between bases, such as the one involved yesterday’s attack. Increased use of Apache gunships to fly shot-gun escorts for the big transport helicopters is also likely.

The RAF uses Chinook helicopters extensively in southern Iraq and they have also come under attack, but so far only with small arms fire. One was lost in May on a mission to Baghdad when it ran out of fuel and had to make a forced landing in the desert.

British commanders, however, have praised the Chinook’s rugged design.