AH-64 D Apache

In the early 1970s, the US Army was keen to adopt a more powerful attack helicopter, with improved anti-tank capabilities and performance over the existing AH-1 Cobra in service at the time. As a result, the Army initiated the "Advanced Attack Helicopter" (AAH) program in November of 1972, requesting design proposals from a number of prominent American helicopter manufacturers.

Subsequently, various designs were proposed by Bell, Boeing, Hughes, Lockheed and Sikorsky. Of all the proposals, the Army picked two designs for further development - Hughes' Model 77 (YAH-64) and Bell's Model 409 (YAH-63).

After conducting their maiden flights on the 30th of September and the 1st of October, 1975, respectively, further testing of the two prototypes showed deficiencies in the fields of survivability and undercarriage stability on Bell's Model 409. As a result, Bell's design was excluded from the competition, while Hughes' design was declared as the winner of the AAH program in 1976.

Following this, work on refining the YAH-64's design continued throughout the late 1970s. As part of this further development, the YAH-64 was optimized for the use of the newly developed AGM-114 Hellfire missile, which was in development since 1974. By the end of the '70s and going into the early '80s, the AH-64 was considered ready for full scale production. In 1981, the first pre-production machines were built, while the first production models began rolling off the assembly lines in 1983. Since then, the Apache has been produced in a huge numbers, participating in virtually every scale military operation of the US Army: Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. Israel became the first foreign operator of the Apache named AH-64 Peten, where this helicopter saw intense combat in Lebanon and Gaza strip.