Left, top. Mockup of the future antitank helicopter of the Heeresflieger. The in fluence of the Italian Mangus/a is quite apparen t. Its armament and observa tion equipment enable it to fight at night in poor visibility conditions. Left, bottom. The Aerospatiale Sa 316 C ALOUETTE Ill was the very first operational helicopter to be used in an antitank role. Right, top . The Franco-German consortium EUROCOPTER is to build the HA P (support and protection) helicopter and the HAG (antitank support) helicopter tor ALAT. Right, bottom. The Aerospatiale 330 GAZELLE has a 1/ght helicopter (HL) role. Its 20 mm cannon makes it suitable for protecting HA formations aga inst other helicopters.
BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) in West Germany, and in Britain itself (Un ited Kingdom Land Forces). ln the BAOR, t he spearhead of t he British land forces, the AAC com bat component is organ ized into Reg iments, which are part of the Division of t he Expeditionary Corps. Each Regimen t, with its minor support un its, is organized into: - a 12-helicopter Reece Squadron; - two 12-helicopter Attack Squadrons. A sim ilar organization is used in the UKLF Reg iments deployed in Britain, although the attack squadrons have only 6 heli copters. The hel icopters used are: - for reconnaissance, th e Aerospatiale 341 Gazelle (bu ilt under li cence by Westland) which can be armed with two pod-mounted 7.62mm mach ine guns; - for attack, the West land Lynx armed with 8 antitank miss iles. SQUADRON DEPLOYMENT TACTICS
Accord ing to Army Corps doctrine, the Linx antitank
helicopt er is employed in a section composed of t hree hel icopters, led by a Section commander. In this way, assum ing that a FARP is avai lable for refuelling and rearming no furt her than 20 Km from the FEBA, each Section in the Squadron can be rotated every 15 minutes so that there can be a constant t urnaround o f one hour for each aircraft . As they w ill go into action mainly over fam iliar terrain (West Germany for the BAOR),
the Lynx c1ews, like their col leagues of the Heeresflieger, will be able to act independently. The main task of the Gazelle helicopters wi ll be to direct th e artillery fire and to watch the flanks of t he antitank helicopters. FUTURE AAC PROGRAMMES
Like the French and Germans, also the British went through a stage of ' adapting' 51