During the war in Afghanistan, 2001 – 2014, staff in the Headquarters of the Armed Forces’ Christian Union were concerned about the vulnerability of rotary wing aircraft in theatre. We sent out a number of Prayer Alerts via the World Prayer Centre in Birmingham to thousands of churches and individual Christians across the nation, as well as to our own members, asking recipients to pray for safety for our troops flying in and maintaining the helicopter force.
There were 11 incidents involving damage to British helicopters, some being damaged beyond repair and some incidents resulting in injuries to service personnel. However, there were no helicopter incidents that resulted in the death of British troops during the whole war until 27 April 2014, when 5 British personnel died in an accident (nothing to do with enemy action) involving a Lynx helicopter.
Even military aviation specialists, expecting considerable losses, expressed surprise at the number of miraculous near-misses and damage that should have caused catastrophic failures of airframes that just did not happen. We heard of one occasion when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) passed straight through a helicopter, missing everybody on board and without exploding. Later, the entry and exit holes were examined and found to be exactly the shape of the grenade with its fins.
One incident reported by one of our members, where we are sure that God answered prayer, was recounted to us like this:
“25 July 2009 started off like any other day for me, flying Chinooks on Ops in Helmand. We crossed over several compounds and then we felt a slight jolt through the airframe. No-one said anything at first until Dom said he thought he’d felt something pass through the airframe. I checked the temperature and pressure but couldn’t find anything. We were carrying a 4.5T Under Slung Load and didn’t make much of it, thinking we’d check for holes when we got on the ground, so we continued our mission. We dropped the load and carried on to pick up people. When we finally got back to Bastion and were refuelling, Dunk said he’d go to look for holes. He found one so we shut down; damage from two rounds, including one in the nose box, was discovered. The engineer said it should have ripped itself to pieces. Somehow it had kept on working! Had we lost our engine, we would have been over Kajaki Lake and it’s likely that we would have had to ditch into the water with very little chance of survival – it’s not easy to swim with body armour on!”
Praise God for His protection and preservation of life. *Photo credit: https://www.pexels.com/@jan-van-der-wolf-11680885