3 Regiment Army Air Corps
military unit
3 Regiment Army Air Corps (3 Regt AAC) is a regiment of the British Army and is under the command of the 1st Aviation Brigade Combat Team within Joint Aviation Command (JAC). The regiment operates the Boeing AH-64E Apache attack helicopter, and is based out of Wattisham Flying Station.
History
On 24 October 1969, the 3 Division Aviation Regiment was formed. At that time, it comprised the 653 Aviation Squadron (Netheravon), the 664 Aviation Squadron (Perham Down), the 665 Aviation Squadron (Colchester) and the 666 Aviation Squadron (Plymouth) as well as 2 Aviation Flight (Perham Down). On 1 January 1973, the regiment was renamed 3 Regiment Army Air Corps (3 Regt AAC) and each of its Aviation Squadrons were re-designated as just Squadron AAC.
Around 1978, the regiment was reformed at Salamanca Barracks in Soest, Germany where it was composed of the 653 Sqn AAC and 663 Sqn AAC. In 1982, the 662 Sqn AAC was reassigned from 2 Regt AAC to 3 Regt AAC and moved to Salamanca Barracks as well. During this period, the regiment operated Westland Gazelle AH.1 and Westland Lynx AH.7 helicopters with the mission of providing direct aviation support to 3rd (United Kingdom) Division (The Iron Division) in the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). The regiment remained in Germany until 1992.
In the summer of 1993, 3 Regt AAC, then comprising the 653, 662, and 663 Sqns, was relocated to the Wattisham Flying Station, Suffolk in support of 24 Airmobile Brigade which was renamed the 16 Air Assault Brigade in 1999 and created from elements of 5 Airborne Brigade and 24 Airmobile Brigade. In 2005, all of the regiment's squadrons began converting from the Lynx to the Apache AH Mk1 attack helicopter.
In 2022, the Army Air Corps began to transition to the Apache AH-64E. The AAC received 14 of the new attack helicopters on 21 January 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “3 Regiment Army Air Corps” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.