An army aviation brigade of the 73rd Army Group in the Eastern Theater of China recently organized a day and night live-fire exercise in a certain sea area in southern Fujian. During the exercise, helicopters including WZ-10, Z-9WA and Mi-17 were dispatched, according to the People’s Liberation Army Daily.
The report not only shows the helicopter gunship formation’s intensive firepower suppressing sea targets, but also shows a rare image of the WZ-10 striking island bunkers with precision. Through the flexible use of machine guns, rockets and air-to-ground missiles, the armed helicopter formation successfully destroyed all kinds of targets at sea and onshore, and even the bunker fortifications on shore were smashed to pieces.
The PLA land forces mainly use AKD-9/10 series air-to-ground missiles as the opposite weapon, even the smaller, lighter weight AKD-9, can penetrate 300mm mean armor, and its top attack mode can destroy most of the armored vehicles in the world.
The Z-9WA helicopter gunship has been tasked with some “air defense” duties during the training. In the picture posted in the report, the Z-9WA easily locked onto a red target aircraft, and then fires an air-to-air missile to blow it up in the air.
The PLA’s special air-to-air missile, the PL-90 (Tianyan-90 or TY-90), is the world’s first air-to-air combat missile developed specifically for helicopter gunships.
It is reported that the PL-90 adopts a special attack method, which can directly attack specific vulnerable parts of enemy aircraft such as engines, rotors and cockpits with the help of the pilot’s helmet sight, with a warhead kill radius of 5 meters and a single shot hit rate of over 80%.