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Why Are Attack Helicopters Called ‘Gunships’?
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Why Are Attack Helicopters Called ‘Gunships’?
By
Eli Shayotovich
Sept. 28, 2026 1:15 pm EST
Manoj Kumar Tuteja/Shutterstock
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The idea of a vehicle that could achieve vertical flight — also known as a helicopter — has been around much longer than you might think. The Chinese created a kite with a rotary wing that produced lift around 400 CE. We have Leonardo da Vinci’s famous 15th-century drawings of such a machine, powered by the use of a what da Vinci called a spiral airscrew. Down through the ages, toys of all kinds — some using bird feathers to mimic rotors — successfully achieved vertical flight.
The first helicopter gunships didn’t come to fruition until the Army needed more from its punchless Bell UH-1 Iroquois Hueys during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The Army added additional layers of armor plating, some side-mounted machine guns, and rocket launchers for good measure, effectively turning it into an airship with guns. Although they’re a far cry from MH-60 Black Hawk gunships used today, they were still effective. Interestingly, the term “gunship” itself has a long and convoluted history in military parlance.
During the Civil War, four decades before the Wright Brothers took to the skies at Kitty Hawk in 1903, both the Union and Confederate navies used heavily armed, steam-powered ironclad ships to patrol rivers, protect supply lines, and attack enemy forts situated on the coast. These types of ships were referred to as gunboats, or gunships, the very same term that would later be adopted to describe heavily armed military aircraft.
Ships with guns have been around for a long time
Duncan1890/Getty Images
If you look in a dictionary, you’ll find that a “gunship” can be one of a few things. Yes, it can be a helicopter armed to the teeth with side-firing guns or cannons used to provide close air support, but it can also be an armed fixed-wing airplane, such as the AC-47 (originally the FC-47), nicknamed “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the first aircraft designated as a gunship.
Bell’s UH-1 Huey — one of the most iconic military helicopters — hit Vietnam in 1963, and by the end of the war over a decade
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