High On The Hog: Aerial Gunning on the Lowrance Ranch with Trijicon

The day is already hot, but up in the sky it’s all fast, fresh air. The rotors of the Robinson R44 helicopter ensure everything is air-cooled at any temperature. From the sky, the land is transformed. The straight horizontal lines and color stripes of a West Texas ranch break into micro terrains of sage, scrub, ponds, and arroyos. Like a magic trick, even the mundane muted greens and browns are revealed to be kaleidoscopes of color. 

“Big sounder right here,” the pilot’s voice cackles in the ear. Her name is Yvonne Abercrombie, and she’s a deft hand in the sky. She was practically raised flying helicopters, cutting her teeth tranquilizing, netting, and transporting exotic animals by air for wealthy clientele. High fence hunting in the Lone Star State is popular for those who can’t be bothered to travel all the way to Africa for an impala, and it’s been said Texas has more tigers in private zoos than exist in the wild. But today isn’t about blesbok or bengals, but boars. 

A sounder is a herd of wild hogs, and there are at least 30 of them. They are as varied as the terrain; some almost blue-black, others a desert yellow, a handful striped and spotted like they’re exotics themselves. The low cattle fences before them barely slow their movement, and they scoot through like it’s no barrier at all. 

“Let me level out — OK, get shooting!”

LOWRANCE RANCH

Traveling to the family owned Lowrance Ranch is like driving through the past while touching the present. It’s a solid three hours from the last tentacles of Dallas, its suburban developments cropping up like mushrooms in the night. This gives way to small towns where the stop lights diminish, restaurants and gas stations combine, and dollar stores have done their own damage. There are miles of wind turbines between these human outposts, with occasional small oil pumpjacks scattered along the roadside as a reminder “This is Texas.” 

Though it was officially founded in the 1950s, ranchers and cowboys have worked on this 43,000-acre plot since before Texas was a part of America — and there are historic buildings to prove it. It’s not a Taylor Sheridan TV show or Instagram ranch; there aren’t people posing while playing cowboy, nor is anyone entertaining Saudi royalty. 

Instead, brothers Tyler and Colton Beam, along with their aunt and a handful of staff, deal with about a thousand head of cattle, a hundred horses, and a scattering of chickens, goats, and buffalo to make their living. 

If you’ve ever wondered where free-range, grass-fed beef comes from, this is it. In a world that’s increasingly industrialized and commercialized, there are still some family ranches way out there. And they’ve got a big pig problem.  

HOGS

Babe, the pig, may be pink and cute, but a wild hog is not. This invasive and pervasive species can destroy land, agriculture, and spread diseases to pets and livestock. The annual associated costs are estimated to exceed $2 billion dollars. And Texas is a hotbed for them. 

It’s for these reasons there’s little regulation regarding how they can be taken down. No season, no limit, anytime, [almost] anywhere, night vision, machineguns — you name it. And still, the spread and population of wild pigs has only increased due to their intelligence, fast reproduction rate, generalist diet, and intentional human proliferation. 

Per the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, aerial gunnery is the most effective means of population control — which is why 2011’s “pork chopper” law was passed — and how we found ourselves at this historic ranch in West Texas.   

The event itself was put together by Trijicon, a Michigan manufacturer of optics and imaging devices. A small group of media members would be using Trijicon’s upgraded and updated REAP-IR and IR-HUNTER heat-seeing thermal optics to take down hogs during darkness, and the new Trijicon MRO SD dot sights in the air by day (for more on these optics, see RECOIL Issue 79). 

GUNS

Nemo Arms supplied the nighttime guns, mine a 16-inch XO Carbon rifle chambered in .308. The thermal optic rode on it, the loud brake rotated off the Proof Research carbon-fiber barrel and replaced with a Silencer Central Banish 30-V2 suppressor. The machining and ambi controls on the Nemo are excellent, and after wrangling too long with the 48-position gas block it proved to be very accurate indeed — all first shot hits with this. 

The guns for the helicopters came from the helicopter outfitters themselves. There’s a frank plainness and lack of pretension that comes with guns that are hard-use utilitarian affairs, especially those with specific requirements. And it’s hard to get more specific than those employed by Lange Helicopters. A great many guns have passed through these airframes, but what owner Kyle Lange calls the “Carnival Gun” has been distilled into something distinct. As parts break, they are replaced, making each these Ship of Theseus Frankensteins something unique. 

The baseline requirement is that the gun must run, run suppressed, and run suppressed as long as possible. It must be easy to use and not make anything more hazardous. 

More than 90,000 rounds are fired from these helicopters every year. And not nice ammunition either, but Russian steel-cased Wolf ammunition purchased by the pallet. This stuff fouls everything faster, is harder on barrels, and rusts if it sits too long — overall it’s closer in quality to what you’d expect from Russian cars rather than caviar.  

Silencers are the norm, largely because of livestock. The pilots and passengers are already all wearing headsets, but while the helicopter is loud the sound of gunfire is much louder. Of course, suppressors can come with their own problems, especially when we’re talking older than the latest low-flo models. And these are all a grab bag of older models with more backpressure. Backpressure means more gas down the barrel — more gas in your face. Dirty glasses, or maybe even a clouded helicopter bubble. They also eat lubricants, so guns seize up faster.

Piston-driven ARs come with their own problems, but there are still some places where they can make sense — and this is one such instance. Lange Helicopters likes to use discontinued Adams Arms AR-15 uppers. They vent gas to the outside from the gas block, which means some of these backpressure effects of older silencers are negated (consequently they can turn your support hand black depending on where you hold it). They’ll also run a long time on crappy ammo with little in the way of lubrication. Curiously, these uppers are paired with LWRCi lowers, which Lange prefers for their excellent ambi features. 

The accessories, and lack thereof, are about hazard avoidance. You don’t want hot brass to go down the shirt of your pilot. You don’t want brass to go below pedals or jam controls. You don’t even want brass to fly out the window and hit spinning rotors. The answer here is a brass catcher. The brass catcher doesn’t even have to be zipped up to do this job; it just has to stop brass from flying all over. 

Carnival Guns also don’t have slings. Slings are snag hazards, and the stick of the Robinson R44 helicopter is right there in the middle. Better to drop a rifle out the window than to take the whole bird down. 

In terms of optics, while low-power variable optics are the glass du jour for the last many years, when it comes to shooting from a bird, the red-dot sight has a great many advantages. The dot is fast to acquire, it’s easy to lead targets, and you don’t have to worry about getting proper eye relief. In our case, the new Trijicon MRD SD with its crisp 2-MOA dot and excellent color rendition atop. 

As for maintenance? Rubdown, some lube, AV gas as solvent when a deeper cleaning is needed. Barrels get tossed when rounds start to keyhole. Silencers get sent in when they get so gummed up they stop working. 

MECHANICS

The first, hardest rule of shooting from a helicopter is that you mustn’t do anything that could take the bird out of the air. While there are places people argue about carrying muzzle-up versus muzzle-down with rifles, you never go muzzle-up when there’s a rotor over your head. You keep everything inside the helicopter except bullets, and you don’t put any new holes in the airframe. 

When it comes time to reload, forget about your “tactical battlespace” or tactics at all. Keep that muzzle depressed, use whatever hand lets you keep it that way and reload best. You want to keep your magazines inside, but you’re also going to be managing a lot of magazines. A bandolier can make this easy — put the empties in a box at your feet. Others advocate for the dump pouch, but any way is right so long as they stay inside and out of the way.

There isn’t a ton of space to maneuver inside a helicopter, but there is enough. You can get a little more if you trust your equipment; sticking your leg out of the door and resting your foot on the landing skid makes for more flexibility of movement. Depending on the length of your legs, this may be putting more confidence in a strap of nylon than you’d like. 

Communication is key, and there are times you shouldn’t shoot. Like when the rotors are in the way. This isn’t always obvious, especially for those who get target-focused. When in doubt, don’t. 

SHOOTING

The traditional target range is two dimensional, with both the shooter and the target remaining static. Even more dynamic games like 3-Gun essentially exist in flatland. Movement, distance, wind, and extreme angles complicates things. And shooting from a helicopter, a thing that can move like a mouse cursor and swing like a hammock, will complicate things considerably. Here are some tips that will help.  

When things are moving, you need to lead your shots. The most basic concept of leading a moving target is shooting slightly ahead of where it’s going, so it meets the bullet on the move. Exactly how far ahead you need to aim depends on how fast it’s moving, how far away you are, and what you’re shooting. If you’re moving and the target is static, this lead is reversed, and you’ll need to aim slightly behind the target in order to make a successful hit. All movement is relative, so if both you and the target are at a constant speed, it’s like there’s no movement at all.

Regarding angles, we zero our guns down here in flatland. Our sights are set so our point-of-aim matches our projectile point-of-impact at a specific distance. Because gravity starts pulling on the bullet the moment it exits the barrel, this projectile path is curved while the sightline is straight (this is always more exaggerated in diagrams). When a target is closer or further from our zero distance, we adjust elevation by dialing (when there is time) or holding over/under (when there isn’t). With a dot, you’ll generally just hold over regardless. 

When you’re shooting at extreme angles, like from a helicopter, things start changing. The gravity is still there, of course, but gravity only pulls in one direction: toward the center of the Earth. Gravity only cares about the horizontal distance the bullet travels. So, if you only estimate bullet drop based on distance from your muzzle to the target, you’re going to miss high. You can figure out the exact adjustment by solving the triangle with trigonometry, but really just remember to hold lower than you think.   

And, of course, there’s wind, and a helicopter makes its own, and even the Magnus effect comes into play; shoot from the left and bullet impacts will be lower, from the right and they’ll hit higher. But there’s more: the cant of your rifle, the cant of the helicopter, even your direction of travel. 

Any one individual shot can be calculated with some known data points, a pencil, and time. A sniper might have a laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, and portable Kestrel weather station with them to engage targets from a mountaintop, but they also have a more-static situation. Shooting evading targets from a moving helicopter is the definition of a dynamic situation. Everything is constantly changing. 

It’s for all these reasons people in the military don’t shoot rifles from helicopters very often. Missiles, rockets, and machineguns are a different story, but those are items with aiming/guidance systems or at least have a ton of tracers spitting out so you can walk in the stream of bullets. 

But military helicopters also have to worry about things shooting back at them. They have to move higher and faster, but all of the effects outlined here matter much less the closer you are and the slower you are. A good, experienced pilot is going to get you there nice and low (think “maiming” height rather than “guaranteed death” height) to best ensure success. 

If you keep these basics in mind, you can get a quick feel for it and learn where to hold in a given position. And don’t be shy with sending rounds down — shoot P for plenty. The terrain can help too, because in many conditions you can see where your rounds kick up — like tracers of your own. 

LOOSE ROUNDS

The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department says that culling hogs from a helicopter is the most effective means of doing so — and we believe it. On one morning flight, nearly a hundred were taken down, and hundreds were taken in days. Since the Pork Chopper law passed in 2011, dozens of helicopter hog outfits have popped up. 

This isn’t hunting, not really; it falls somewhere between a job at a slaughterhouse and an arcade. But just because it isn’t strictly hunting doesn’t mean it isn’t sporting or ecologically beneficial — it’s definitely challenging. If you take the opportunity, do everyone involved a favor, pigs included, and make sure you have the basics of shooting down first. 

After seeing so many killed in a single morning, it almost seems inconceivable that we can’t eradicate them, but there’s a lot of land out there. Still, at least one ranch got some breathing room. 

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