One of the early benefits of President Muhammadu Buhari’s visit to the United States, US, is that Nigeria will soon take delivery of its first set of Apache attack helicopters. Newsessence learnt that a $500 million deal was structured by President Buhari and President Barack Obama, made up of soft loans and hardware to Nigerian Air force, which includes the Apache attack helicopters to help fight the Boko Haram insurgency in North-east Nigeria.

The Apache attack helicopter is a Boeing AH-64 four-blade, twin-turbo shaft attack helicopter with a tail wheel-type landing gear arrangement, and a tandem cockpit for a two-man crew. It features a nose-mounted sensor suite for target acquisition and night vision systems. It is armed with a 30 mm (1.18 in) M230 chain gun carried between the main landing gear, under the aircraft’s forward fuselage. It has four hard points mounted on stub-wing pylons, typically carrying a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and Hydra 70 rocket pods. The AH-64 has a large amount of systems redundancy to improve combat survivability.