Kestrel Attack

The Kestrel Attack is a very light Venezuelan attack helicopter featured in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

Overview
The Kestrel Attack is one of the most basic attack helicopters, it is only used by the Venezuelan Army. It useful for scouting enemy positions or defending areas from light vehicles. It is hard to hit due to its small size and can move at high speeds.

This helicopter is able to perform light attacks on small enemy forces using its minigun against soft targets such as infantry and jeeps, its one missile is only effective against vehicles no heavier than a light tank. It has a large amount of minigun ammo, making it very useful against infantry, jeeps, trucks and other soft targets; however, it only has one missile and must be used sparingly.

It can be seen in these contracts: Misha's recruitment, 'Phone Tag', 'Leave No Trace', 'Tropical Island Getaway', 'Endangered Cargo (Level 3)', 'Mainland Outpost', 'Black Market Warm Heart (Level 3)', 'Get Blanco', 'Get Solano' and 'Get Solano Part 2' making it a very common helicopter. It is sold by the Pirates for prices of 112.5k and $75k depending on the Pirates' relation with the Mercenary.

Tactics
This helicopter is poorly equipped for combat with vehicles of armor types 3 and 4, it is a better idea to stick to engaging armor types 2 and infantry. Most buildings and type 3-4 armor vehicles cannot be destroyed by this helicopter since it only has one ATGM.

The NPC crew in this helicopter are poorly defended from bullets and shrapnel, it is possible to shoot the crew out of their helicopter with any type of weapon.

In co-op, a cool (but not very efficient) way to dispatch infantry and vehicles over a large area, is to have one  player get on the gunner position and the other player get in the pilot seat to fly around the target area while the gunner eliminates infantry.

Real Life
The Kestrel helicopters appear to be based on the French Aérospatiale Alouette III.

Related Pages

 * Kestrel
 * Kestrel Tank Hunter
 * Toucan Transport

Trivia

 * The Kestrel Attack helicopter is known as the 'Alanzo' in the PlayStation 2 version of the game