High above the misty jungle mountains of Laos, an unarmed supply helicopter found itself in the middle of an air raid. Its crew had a choice: flee, or fight back with the only weapon on board — a single AK-47 rifle. They chose to fight. What happened next has never happened before or since.

On January 12, 1968, a Central Intelligence Agency helicopter shot down an enemy airplane. It remains the only time in history a helicopter has been credited with destroying a fixed-wing aircraft in air combat.

The Secret Mountain

The prize was a mountaintop called Phou Pha Thi, in the trackless highlands of northern Laos. On its summit sat Lima Site 85, a covert U.S. radar installation that guided American bombers toward targets deep inside North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese wanted it gone — and they reached for an unlikely weapon. Four Antonov An-2 “Colt” biplanes, slow fabric-and-wire machines straight out of the 1940s, were crudely modified to rain mortar rounds and rockets down on the site.

An Unfair Fight, Reversed

Into this scene flew Captain Ted Moore, an Air America pilot ferrying ammunition to the site in a UH-1 Huey. Air America was the CIA’s secret airline, and its crews flew into places no one would admit existed. Spotting the attack, Moore realised his helicopter was actually faster than the lumbering biplanes. He gave chase.

Pulling his Huey above one of the Colts, Moore used his own rotor downwash to stall the biplane’s upper wing, forcing it to wallow and slow. In the open doorway, flight mechanic Glenn Woods levelled his AK-47 and opened fire straight down into the aircraft. The Colt grew more and more unstable until it rolled over and smashed into the jungle below. Of the four raiders, two were lost that day.

It was, in the words of those who study these things, an air combat first: a slow propeller biplane brought down not by a fighter, but by a transport helicopter and a man with an infantry rifle.

A Kill Like No Other

The engagement earned a permanent, peculiar place in aviation history — the sole confirmed helicopter-versus-fixed-wing victory ever recorded, and the only aerial kill ever credited to the CIA. There is a tragic coda: just weeks later, in March 1968, Lima Site 85 was overrun in a North Vietnamese ground assault, with heavy loss of life among the Americans defending the radar the biplanes had failed to destroy.

But on that January morning, against every expectation, a supply helicopter and a borrowed rifle won a dogfight.

Sources: Central Intelligence Agency; War History Online; The Aviation Geek Club; GunsAmerica.