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CNN Live At Daybreak

America Strikes Back: Helicopters, Other Air War Machines

Aired October 25, 2001 - 07:46   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The helicopter is a key tool for the U.S. military in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. But Afghan fighters have gone up against a high-tech army before, and they won.

To find out how, let's go to Miles O'Brien, who joins us from the CNN center in Atlanta.

I guess, Miles, it's important for us to point that the Afghan certainly found the Achilles' heel against the Soviet military, didn't they?

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They certainly did. The Soviets came in, 1979, and they had impressive helicopter capability and superiority that went along with that. But what happened was it became a proxy Cold War fight, and in doing so doing, the CIA supplied the mujahideen the resistance in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles. Those are infrared heat-seeking missiles that pretty much nullified the advantage that the Soviets had with their helicopters.

Let's just take a look back at some of the images from those days of the mujahideen. The CIA invested $10 billion in arming them. Some 500 Stinger missiles were brought into the region; 200 to 300 of those remain unaccounted for despite the fact that the CIA instituted a buyback program once the Soviets left and this Cold War proxy war was over, which brings us to today.

And let's just give you a sense Afghanistan is a tailor-made country for a helicopter ambush. We put up animation, which gives you a sense of how this might actually work. As a helicopter comes into a canyon, of course, its vulnerabilities are they fly low and they fly slow, and when you have a country like Afghanistan, with all of its steep and narrow canyons dotted with caves, which provide all kinds of cover -- you have a helicopter that is in a potentially vulnerable situation as it goes and tries to identify a target, for example.

As it comes along, it's very possible and very easy -- it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel, really, for a Stinger missile to hone in on a helicopter as it comes through a canyon like that. And tracking the heat of the engines can bring a helicopter down in fairly short order. Of course, the Achilles' heel of a helicopter is its tail rotor. If you hit that, it goes down very quickly.

Now let's talk a little bit about these Stinger missiles and give you a sense of what they're all about. We don't know how many survived. They need batteries to be refreshed and so forth. But let's say there might be 100 of them. It's a shoulder-fired surface- to-air missile, has a range of up to 10,000 feet, 5 miles horizontally. It flies supersonic, has a high explosive warhead and it's fire-and-forget, which means once you shoot it, once you lock in, you can take cover, and it aims for the engine.

Now as for what it might be up against, the Blackhawk helicopter, the UH-60, which is one of the many helicopters that the U.S. military used. This replaced the famous Huey that was used in Vietnam. It can hold 11 people, actually 12 combat troops, plus the crew. It's used by all branches. What it does have, it has chaff, which allows it to spoof against a radar-guided missile, and flares, which allow it to try to decoy out an infrared-type of device, a heat-seeking missile, like a Stinger.

The other thing that is really key about the U.S. strategy is it's very unpredictable, and perhaps most important, most of these missions occur at night, which makes it very difficult to home in on a helicopter.

If you want to find out more about the U.S. helicopters, the Stinger missile, and what it's like to engage in helicopter activities in this kind of terrain, we invite you to check out cnn.com and click on the U.S. military aircraft location, and it'll give you a sense of all the rotor craft, the fighters, unmanned cargo tankers, just about everything that's used on the U.S. side of things in this engagement -- and that's at CNN.com, and of course the AOL Keyword is CNN -- Paula.

ZAHN: Oh, I was going to tell you that Miles. I know the AOL Keyword.

O'BRIEN: Did I take your line?

ZAHN: You took away my thunder.

O'BRIEN: I'm sorry.

ZAHN: You can come to me every time, all right, for the AOL Keyword. I got it down pat.

O'BRIEN: Perhaps we should underscore the point: The AOL Keyword is...

ZAHN: CNN.

O'BRIEN: There it is.

Thank you, Miles, for that opportunity. See you a little bit later on this morning.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SANDY DUDA, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: My name is Sandy Duda. I am from Kansas City, Missouri. And I would like to ask CNN to explain the recording devices in airplane cockpits, where they are located in the cockpit, and if they can be turned off in flight?

O'BRIEN: Sandy, the cockpit voice recorder is able to capture 30 minutes of conversation inside the cockpit at any given moment. The actual recording device is in the tail of the aircraft. It's put there so that it's most survivable in the event of a crash.

The microphone itself is in the instrument panel above the windshield, where the pilot and co-pilot sit. In addition to that microphone, conversations which occur on their headset microphones also feed into the cockpit voice recorder.

There are some circuit breakers right near that microphone that disable the cockpit voice recorder, so it is possible for pilots to disable the cockpit voice recorder. They are only supposed to under certain conditions.

Now, this is one of two so-called black boxes that are in every commercial airliner. They aren't really black. They're actually painted orange so that they're easy to find in the event of a crash.

The other box, called the flight data recorder, captures key information about the flight instrumentation, the engine settings, and exactly what was going on mechanically with an aircraft for a very long period of time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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