By Liu Xiaohong and Feng Fei
FUZHOU, June 28 -- Recently, an army aviation brigade under the PLA 73rd Group Army organized a round-the-clock live-fire exercise off China’s southeast coast with multiple types of aircraft and ammunitions involved, aiming to improve the maritime all-dimensional penetration and strike capacities of the army aviation forces.
In this live-fire exercise at sea, the pilots were required to plan attack routes, conduct reconnaissance and choose best attack time independently, which were much closer to actual combat and gave full play to the pilots' ability of making independent judgments and decisions.
At 8 a.m. on the training day, loaded with cannons, rockets and missiles, multi-type armed helicopters took off and entered the attack positions. Then, the pilots searched for fixed targets on islands and reefs, as well as the mobile targets at sea, and chose the best kind of ammunitions to carry out continuous firepower strikes.
In the training event of cooperative attack on a single target by two choppers during the daytime, two new armed helicopters carrying a variety of ammunitions served to cover each other in the air, approached the target secretly in low altitude, locked on the target from different angles and carried out the strike simultaneously.
"In the exercise, we conducted the training through day and night, set multiple kinds of targets on land, at sea and in the air, and stressed on the tactical coordination in continuous strikes by multiple projectiles. The gunship pilots have greatly improved their combat effectiveness in such an actual combat environment", said Zhou Zhirong, a flight commander of this army aviation brigade.