On Monday, Raytheon, a high energy laser system developer for the US army, said that it had bolted a laser to a U.S. Army Apache AH-64 helicopter and zapped an unmanned target at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The weapons test marked the first time a “fully integrated laser system” had successfully located and shot a target from a rotary-wing aircraft “over a wide variety of flight regimes, altitudes and air speeds,” the company said in a statement.
Raytheon didn’t specify what the target was but said the helicopter’s laser “directed energy” on it from nearly a mile away. Unlike the computer rendering of the weapon provided by the company, the laser’s beam is invisible in real life.
Video from the missile range shows the Apache flying over the New Mexico desert with the laser — a gray, torpedo-like tube with a ball on the front — attached to the vehicle’s right side. Orange cables run from the back of the laser into the interior of the helicopter. At one point the video shows black and white images of a rectangular object with a bright flash in the center of it, captioned “LASER ON TARGET.” Dramatic drum music plays in the background. The laser’s shots were not shown in the footage.
The goal of the experiment, conducted in collaboration with U.S. Special Operations Command, was to see how well the Apache could fire the weapon given the vibration of the helicopter, the dust kicked up by the rotating blades and the vehicle’s “downwash,” or downward airflow. The information the team gleaned will be used to further develop the weapon, known simply as a High Energy Laser, or HEL.