Insurgency in the North Caucasian Federal District - War Stories From the Front Lines: # 1 Helicopter Attack in Novopavlovsk

Captain Vasily Kashlev, 118th Independent Helicopter Squadron (Russian Air Force), recounts his first mission against insurgents in the town of Novopavlovsk.

High altitude holding station. Waiting for orders.

Our first mission was to conduct an attack on a suspected insurgent roadblock on one of the bridges across the Kura River. Our flight was composed of two Ka-50s and the flight plan had us flying at high altitude to avoid insurgent air defenses, waiting for target data from the mission commander.

Target acquisition and mission command was in charge of a Ka-27. This setup served us very well during the Chechen War.

Unfortunately, this time the Ka-27 proved useless to acquire targets. Mission command cleared us for closing in and develop the situation.

Making use of the powerful navigational system of the Ka-50, I punched the coordinates of the bridge where the insurgent roadblock was reported. 

I designated the bridge as "target point 1" (blue square) and aligned our flight with the target from our holding station. This is in an image of the ABRIS system, which features a moving map with waypoints (blue dots) and our flight path (black line). In this case, we flew over way point four and made a wide turn towards the target area.

The TV-based Shkval targeting system has a magnification power enough to single out infantry (small dots on the near side of the river) from a distance of 13.2 km.

I decided to conduct a medium altitude, high speed gun run to get an idea of the air defenses at the insurgent's disposal. I overrode the firing control system in order to use the gun at a very long range.

Right after we broke from our attack run, the insurgents fired IR-guided portable missiles. Likely Stingers. I got hit and lost hydraulic power shorty after the missile's impact. 

Devoid of hydraulic power, my control of the aircraft quickly deteriorated.  I decided to fly as far as possible from the insurgent's position and conduct a forced landing. I made it as far as 35 km from the target area. My landing gear didn't deploy due to the hydraulic failure and I had (with much effort) to land with the belly of the aircraft. 

My wingman stayed near my position long enough to transmit all the details about my position to our airbase in Mineralnye Vody.

We couldn't conduct any battle damage assessment, but we suspect that at least one enemy vehicle was destroyed. As for the failure of our mission, several factors contributed to it:
- Inadequate countermeasures deployment. I programmed my flares to be deployed too many and two spaced (1 burst of three flares each side every four seconds).
- We could have used the high depression capability of the main gun to conduct the attack run from a higher altitude.