Prince Harry Completes Training to Be Combat-Helicopter Pilot
Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, completed 18 months of training to become an attack-helicopter pilot, opening up the possibility that he could be deployed in a combat role.
The prince was awarded a prize at a dinner last night for being best co-pilot gunner on his course to fly Boeing Co. (BA) AH-64 Apache helicopters, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an e- mailed statement. The training included a two-month stint in the U.S., which includes firing all the aircraft’s weapons in realistic tactical scenarios. Harry, 27, has now attained “limited combat-ready” status, the ministry said.
“The Apache course is extremely challenging, teaching and testing students in their flying skills, decision making and mental agility on exercise all over the country and abroad,” Colonel Neale Moss, who commands the attack-helicopter force at the Royal Air Force base at Wattisham in eastern England, said in the statement. He described the Apache as “one of the most sophisticated attack helicopters in the world.”
Prince Harry became the first British royal for more than 25 years to fight in a war zone when he served with U.K. forces in Afghanistan for more than two months in 2008. He worked as a forward air controller for the NATO mission in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. The prince had to be withdrawn from the country after news of his deployment leaked out.
The previous year, he’d been prevented from joining British forces in Iraq because of army concern that he might be a high- profile target. Harry entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Surrey, in 2005 to train as an officer and was commissioned in April 2006 as a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry. He was promoted to the rank of captain in 2011.
‘Train for War’
“You train for war, it’s as simple as that,” Harry said in an ABC television interview in June 2010. “If we’re at war, then you want to be with your brothers in arms.”
Harry’s elder brother, Prince William, a search-and-rescue pilot in the RAF, began a two-month deployment last week to the Falkland Islands, at the same time as the Royal Navy sent one its newest destroyers to the South Atlantic.
Argentina, which went to war with Britain over the Falklands in 1982, said William was in the disputed islands in the “uniform of a conqueror.” The princes’ uncle, Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, served as a helicopter pilot in the 1982 Falklands conflict.
To contact the reporter on this story: Eddie Buckle in London at ebuckle@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net
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