helicopter "Apache AH-64" was created to combat ground targets.Its predecessor, "AH-1 Cobra", has proved during the Vietnam War, the US military needs in the machines, capable of leading the hunt for the secretive enemy in difficult conditions and active current air defense.The main requirements for the new attack helicopters became powerful weapons, long life, the possibility of high-speed flight at low altitude and high degree of automation of the fire.Flight characteristics listed separately.
In the preliminary contest win streak in the state aircraft construction firm Hughes and Bell, to provide samples, to the greatest extent meet the needs of the military.However, Bell was eliminated from the second round due to the fact that it is conceptually the helicopter was a modernized "Cobra" and the Pentagon needed a completely new car.
By the end of 1976 the company Hughes was entrusted with the construction of a new attack helicopter for the US Army, and began work on the final design of the project.They lasted a long time, five years, and failed.The new machine has been approved by military pilots, and in 1093 she began to come into service under the name "Apache".The helicopter is based in Arizona, on a specially constructed for the purpose of industrial sites.
company McDonnell Douglas, famous for his "Phantom" in the reorganization bought Hughes together with its orders and production and since 1984 has continued under its own brand to build "Apache."The helicopter has been ordered for the army, and for the United States National Guard.Over the next ten years, it was built more than eight hundred vehicles at an average cost of fourteen and a half million each.
In the process of development works taken many measures to protect "Apache".Helicopter arranged very efficiently, making it difficult to detect and defeat.
Cooling two interchangeable turbine engines XT-700 is organized so as to minimize the heat in the air trail, which is a mixture of exhaust air to the outside.
Noise carried through the use of a cross-shaped tail rotor fitted with blades arranged at different angles, so as to disperse the sound waves produced by the engine.
Reservation cockpit and basic vital nodes makes it very problematic disabling and destroying the more firepower the caliber of 30 mm.Resource survivability allows you to reach your base with one engine inoperative.
In turn, the complex provides on-board weapons different options of external suspension and turret gun.
diverse and avionics, which is equipped with "Apache".Helicopter "see" in the dark due to thermal imager and laser rangefinder, he can put the radio interference and shoot infrared cartridges.The radar placed above the hub of the rotor, accompanied by more than two hundred targets simultaneously, notifies the air defenses, detects and classifies the fixed objects.
Besides the US Army operators of this machine became the armed forces of many countries.Since 1991, practically there was no armed conflict involving the United States, which would not participate "Apache".Helicopter showed himself very well, and identified deficiencies gave rise to refine and improve the design.
