Military question.

With bravado, courage, guts and
not doing harm to your fellow soldiers,
unless thats the plan.
Either create a diversion, or take one that
is already at full power ready to launch.

Not that the place really matters...? Did you mean to say Iraq instead of Iran, or is that part of the idea?

So, you are IN Iran and want to highjack a Blackhawk from an American grp, to go where? Or you want to go TO Iran in one, and from what location?

My hubby was a chopper crew-chief for 30 yrs, most non-attack types. He also knows how to fly them.
I can ask him if you can clarify a bit more, okay?

"Hijack" - meaning to force the pilot at gunpoint to fly you somewhere? Or 'hijack' as in sneak onto base and steal one - assuming your character is rated in rotary wings.

I'm not going to give you a detailed answer, mainly because I'm not going to post anything like this on an open-source web site.

However, your antagonists are going to encounter many problems:
1) Roving security guards with live ammunition
2) Helicopters are secured unless they're actually getting ready to lift off
3) Blackhawks don't have the range to get back to the States, no matter how much fuel you load them up with. They can not cross the oceans in either direction.
4) Unless your antagonists are rotary-wing qualified, they're unlikely to get very far, even if they can get the 'hawk turned on
5) Good chance they'd be shot down rather quickly as soon as the IFF for that particular 'hawk was identified. Unarmed helicopters don't do well against an A-10 firing 30mm rounds through it.
6) Helicopters are finely tuned instruments. Your antagonists would need parts and a mechanic to keep it flying for very long.
7) Most helicopter pilots don't fly more than X number of hours a day before manditory rest. You'd need multiple pilots.
8) Fuel supplies are also guarded.
9) Even if they get out of Iran, as soon as they cross another country's borders, they'll be running into Air Defense systems and likely shot out of the sky by anti-air missiles.

However, with good planning and/or a lot of luck, your antagonists might be able to swipe the helicopter . . . but they're not getting home in one.

Elegy said:

Say you're deployed to Iran and you want to hijack a Blackhawk.

How would that go?

Click to expand...

Iran?

Where would one want to go with the Black Hawk? Is it an UH-60L, UH-60M, or one of the special operations aircraft? Is it Army, or an Air Force PAVE HAWK?

I think maybe you mean to steal the aircraft, as opposed to hijack it, right?

Apparently this is a near future story in which Iran is under American military occupation.

Which was not clear from the original post.

Yeah, I see that now. But does he want a FOB or a FARP? That's the real question.

Elegy said:

Ooh, awesome. Nope, I think I'm going with Iran. It's set a little in the future (okay, a lot in the future).

So yes, the characters are in Iran, and they want to go back to the states.

I'd like to know where on a "FOB" the choppers are kept, what the security is like, whether it would be possible to actually get from Iran to the states, can they possibly carry fuel with them if they need to refuel before they get there, etc.

Click to expand...

The only way a Black Hawk (two words, not one) could get to the US is if it's a special operations aircraft and if the USAF or USMC were inclined to refuel it about a million times along the way.

Basically, a Black Hawk (we'll use an MH-60L for planning purposes) has legs just long enough to maybe make it 300 statute miles without needing another load of go-juice. That also depends on air density, winds, aircraft weight and if all the bolt-on special operations aviation gear is present, etc., etc., etc.

No way to get to the US in any scenario I can conceive of.

I suppose he only has to reach Russia