Rust Attack Helicopter Guide: Cost, Weapons & Flares

The Rust Attack Helicopter is the only vehicle in the game that shoots back. Every other aircraft moves you around the map. This one turns two players into a flying gun platform with rockets, a turret and enough scrap sunk into it to end your wipe if it goes wrong.

It costs 2,250 scrap, which is three minicopters, and it is the single most expensive thing Air Wolf sells. For that you get a pilot seat, a gunner seat with a real targeting screen, side pods full of rockets, a chin turret that eats any gun you feed it, and a stack of decoy flares to shrug off SAM sites. It is fast, loud, and it makes you the biggest target on the server the second you take off.

This guide covers exactly what an attack helicopter in Rust costs, where to buy one, how the weapons and the gunner seat actually work, the full control scheme for both seats, how flares beat SAM lock, and how many rockets it takes to bring one down when the heli belongs to someone else.

• What It Is
• Cost
• Where to Buy
• Full Stats
• Weapons
• The Gunner Seat
• Controls
• Flares & SAMs
• Fuel & Range
• Decay & Repair
• How to Destroy One
• vs Other Aircraft
• vs Patrol Helicopter
• Spawn Command
• Console Edition
• Myths & Mistakes
• Pro Tips
• FAQ

What Is the Attack Helicopter in Rust?

The Attack Helicopter is a two seat armed helicopter you buy from Air Wolf. It landed in the Airborne update on 7 September 2023, alongside parachutes and the armored hot air balloon, and it changed what a helicopter means in Rust. Before it, aircraft were transport. This one is a weapon.

The whole design is built around the split between the two seats. The pilot sits in the rear and flies, the same way you fly a minicopter, and can fire rockets straight ahead without any aiming help. The gunner sits up front behind a targeting screen and controls the chin turret and the rockets properly, with a diamond that shows exactly where the next rocket will land. One person can technically run it, but a solo pilot is firing blind. The heli wants a crew.

What it gives you is the ability to bring real firepower to a fight that used to need boots on the ground. Roof camping a base, clearing an oil rig, punishing a group caught in the open, opening a wood or stone base from the air. What it costs you is subtlety. Everyone on that half of the map hears it, it is a huge target, and losing it is 2,250 scrap plus whatever was loaded in the pods.

How Much Does an Attack Helicopter Cost in Rust?

An Attack Helicopter costs 2,250 scrap, and it arrives with 100 low grade fuel already in the tank. That is the base price, and it is the most expensive vehicle Air Wolf stocks by a wide margin. A minicopter is 750, a scrap transport is 1,250, and the attack heli is 2,250, so you are paying triple the price of the starter aircraft.

That 2,250 is a base rate, not a locked price. Since the dynamic vendor pricing system landed in July 2024, every NPC vendor moves its prices with supply and demand, and Air Wolf is no exception. Early in a wipe when everyone is loaded and wants to fly, the attack heli climbs above 2,250. Late in a dead wipe it drops. Check the terminal before you commit, because walking to Bandit Camp with exactly 2,250 scrap and finding it priced at 2,400 is a bad afternoon.

Where to Buy an Attack Helicopter: The Air Wolf Vendor

Every attack helicopter in the game comes from one place: the Air Wolf shop inside Bandit Camp. There is no second vendor, no Outpost option, no crafting recipe and no world spawn. If you want one, you carry your scrap to Bandit Camp.

Air Wolf sits in its own building on the edge of the compound with the landing pad right outside. Bandit Camp is a safe zone, so nobody shoots you while you shop, and that protection ends the instant you lift off the pad. The moment you are airborne you are fair game, and a fresh attack heli lifting out of Bandit Camp is a magnet for anyone camping the roads nearby.

1. Reach Bandit Camp with the scrap on you. Scrap in a box at home is not scrap at the terminal.
2. Open the Air Wolf terminal. It is the vending screen inside the Air Wolf building.
3. Buy the Attack Helicopter. It spawns on the pad outside, not in your hands.
4. Get in and fly it off the pad. You have a five minute reserved window before anyone else can buy, and you want to be gone before it closes.

Rust Attack Helicopter Stats

Here is the whole vehicle in one table. These are vanilla values pulled from the game’s own entity data, not copied from other guides.

Attack Helicopter Weapons: Turret, Rockets and Flares

This is what you are paying for. The attack heli carries three separate weapon systems, and all three are worked properly from the gunner seat.

The chin turret

The front of the heli has a turret that behaves like a mounted Auto Turret. It accepts the same weapons an Auto Turret can, so you load it with a gun and ammo of your choice, and the gunner fires it manually from the targeting screen. It is not automatic and it does not pick its own targets, it is a crewed gun. A solid all rounder like an assault rifle from our Rust weapons lineup works well, but anything the turret accepts is fair game. Only the gunner can use it, so a pilot flying alone cannot touch it.

The rocket pods

The side pods are the main event. They hold up to 36 rockets, and here is the catch that trips people up: they take High Velocity rockets and Incendiary rockets only. You cannot load standard rockets into an attack heli. Rockets fire in a volley of 6 by default with an 8 second cooldown between volleys, so you are managing bursts, not a steady stream.

HV rockets are the workhorse. They are cheap, fast, and fly flat, which makes them easy to land on a target from the air. Incendiary rockets trade raw damage for a fire that lingers, useful for flushing players out of cover or setting a wooden base alight. Most crews run HV and keep a few incendiary for area denial.

Decoy flares

The heli carries up to 30 flares, and they are the reason a good pilot can fly past defences that would shred a minicopter. Flares are decoys that break the lock of homing missiles and pull SAM site fire off the aircraft. They fire on a 30 second cooldown, and both the pilot and the gunner can deploy them. More on the SAM matchup below, because it is the thing that keeps most attack helis alive.

The Gunner Seat and Targeting Screen

The gunner is what makes the attack heli more than an expensive minicopter. Press E in the front seat and you drop into a targeting screen with a point of impact diamond, a range readout, and ammo counters for the turret and the rockets.

That diamond is the whole point. On the pilot side, rockets fire straight out of the nose with no guide, so hitting anything means lining up the entire aircraft and guessing the drop. On the gunner side, the diamond tells you the exact impact point, so you can hover, mark a doorway or a player, and drop six rockets on it. The turret works the same way, fired with the left mouse button and reloaded with R, while rockets fire with the right mouse button.

The practical takeaway is simple. A duo gets the most out of an attack heli, because one player flies smooth and steady while the other does nothing but aim. A solo can fly it and fire rockets blind, and that is genuinely useful for opening a base wall, but you are leaving most of the heli’s value in the empty front seat.

How to Fly an Attack Helicopter: Controls

Flying an attack heli is the same core skill as a minicopter, because W is throttle, not forward. W spins the rotors up so you climb, the mouse tilts you in the direction you want to travel, and the two seats have completely different jobs once you are in the air.

If you have never flown before, do not learn on a 2,250 scrap attack heli. Learn the throttle feel on a cheap minicopter first, or better, on a training server, and only step up to the attack heli once landing flat and holding a hover are automatic. Our full minicopter flight guide covers the throttle and tilt basics that carry straight over.

Flares, SAM Sites and Getting Shot Down

Once you are in the air you are a large, slow, loud target. Two things threaten an attack heli more than any player with a rifle: SAM sites and homing missiles. Flares are the answer to both, and knowing how to use them is the difference between a heli that raids and a heli that becomes a smoking crater on someone’s roof.

SAM sites lock onto aircraft and fire homing missiles at them. A base with a couple of SAMs on the roof is a real threat to an attack heli, and flying straight over one is how expensive helis die. The flare is your counter: pop one as the missile launches and it diverts to the decoy instead of the aircraft. With 30 flares on a 30 second cooldown, you can survive a long approach if you time them, but you cannot facetank a wall of SAMs forever.

There is one geometry trick worth knowing. SAM sites do not fire at anything below their own height. Flying low, in the terrain, past a base with a rooftop SAM is survivable. Climbing up over it is not. Combine the two habits, stay low when you can and flare when you have to climb, and you can operate around defended bases that would delete a minicopter instantly.

Attack Helicopter Fuel and Flight Time

The attack heli runs on low grade fuel and burns 30 a minute, exactly like every other Air Wolf aircraft. The tank holds 500, so a full tank is about 16 minutes 40 seconds of flight.

The extra weight and firepower do not change the burn rate, so flight time is identical to a minicopter and a scrap transport. What changes is the stakes. A minicopter that runs dry is a 750 scrap walk home. An attack heli that runs dry over the wrong grid is 2,250 scrap plus a pod full of HV rockets sitting on the ground for anyone to grab. Fly the half tank rule: whatever is in the tank at takeoff, half of it is your turnaround point.

Decay, Repair and Storing an Attack Helicopter

Like every vehicle in Rust, the attack heli decays when nobody is using it, and the timer depends entirely on whether it has a roof.

• Outside: 480 minutes. Eight hours from full health to destroyed. Leave it on the open ground overnight and it will be a wreck or gone by morning.
• Under a roof: 2,880 minutes. Forty eight hours, six times longer, for the price of a few building blocks overhead.

Decay starts after roughly ten minutes with nobody mounted. The key detail, same as the minicopter, is that “indoors” only means something overhead. You do not need four walls, just a roof or floor tile above the aircraft to flip it from the 8 hour timer to the 48 hour one.

Repairing is cheap relative to the price of the thing. Hold a hammer, carry metal fragments, and hit it. A full repair from zero to 850 HP is 500 metal fragments across 17 swings, about 8.5 seconds, with each swing restoring roughly 51 HP. You cannot repair immediately after taking damage, so break contact first, and decay damage repairs exactly like combat damage.

How to Destroy an Attack Helicopter

Sooner or later the attack heli you are looking at belongs to someone else, and you want it gone. It has 850 HP and takes explosive damage, so this is about how much boom it takes to drop one. The cheapest answer by a mile is HV rockets.

Three HV rockets for around 600 sulfur is the play when you have time to line them up, and it is why the attack heli is dangerous to its own owner: the same HV rockets it fires are the cheapest thing that kills it. If the heli is parked and you are actively raiding, a single C4 ends it in about ten seconds, which matters when the owner might come back. For the full breakdown of sulfur costs across every explosive, our Rust raid calculator has the numbers.

Attack Helicopter vs Minicopter vs Scrap Transport

Air Wolf sells four aircraft. Here is where the attack heli fits, and what the extra scrap actually buys over the cheaper options.

The number that surprises people is the health. The attack heli has 850 HP, which is less than the scrap transport’s 1000. You are not paying for durability, you are paying for weapons. All four burn the same 30 low grade a minute out of the same 500 tank, so flight time is identical across the lineup at about 16 and a half minutes.

For most players the honest answer is still the minicopter. It is the cheapest, it repairs for pocket change, and losing one does not end your wipe. The attack heli is a wipe defining purchase for an established group with a target, not a general purpose runabout. If you just need to move people and loot, the scrap transport does that better for half the price.

Attack Helicopter vs Patrol Helicopter

Quick disambiguation, because the search terms blur together. The Attack Helicopter is the player vehicle this guide covers: you buy it, you fly it, you crew it. The Patrol Helicopter, which a lot of players also call the attack heli, is the NPC event helicopter that spawns on a timer, flies to monuments, and opens fire on any player it sees carrying too much heat.

They are completely different things. The Patrol Helicopter cannot be bought or flown, it is an AI gunship you fight for its crate loot, and it does not use flares or a gunner seat. If you searched for how often the attack heli spawns, or whether it will hit your base, you are almost certainly thinking of the Patrol Helicopter. This guide is about the one you can own. The one that hunts you is a separate monster with its own loot table and its own strategy.

Attack Helicopter Spawn Command

If you run your own server or have admin, you can spawn one directly instead of paying 2,250 scrap for it.

It needs admin or owner authorisation and has to be run in game through the F1 console rather than over RCON. For everything else you can type into that console, from god mode to teleport to time of day, see our Rust console commands guide.

The Attack Helicopter on Rust Console Edition

Console players get the same attack helicopter, the same Air Wolf vendor at Bandit Camp and the same 2,250 scrap base price. The mechanics carry over: 850 HP, two seats, a gunner turret, HV and incendiary rocket pods, and flares.

The one thing console players ask about most is flares, because the button is not obvious on a controller. The flare deploy sits on the same aim and fire logic as the rockets, mapped to the controller’s fire inputs rather than a mouse button, so check your control layout in the options menu for the exact binding on your platform. Console runs behind PC on updates, so if a price or a detail in this guide does not match what you see, that is why, but the attack heli has been in console for a while and plays the same.

Attack Helicopter Myths and Mistakes

Myth: it takes normal rockets. It does not. The pods take HV and Incendiary rockets only. Standard rockets will not load.

Myth: the pilot can use the turret. No. The chin turret and the aiming diamond only exist in the gunner seat. A solo pilot fires rockets blind and cannot touch the turret at all.

Myth: you can lock it. There is no code lock, no key and no ownership on any Air Wolf aircraft, including this one. Anyone who finds it unattended can fly off in it.

Myth: it is the toughest aircraft. It is not. At 850 HP the attack heli has less health than the 1000 HP scrap transport. You pay for guns, not armour.

Myth: flares make it invincible to SAMs. Flares buy time, not immunity. Thirty flares on a 30 second cooldown will not outlast a wall of SAM sites all firing at once.

Mistake: flying it before you can fly a mini. This is a 2,250 scrap aircraft. Learn the throttle on something cheap first.

Mistake: leaving it on the Air Wolf pad. The next customer’s purchase deletes every vehicle on the pad. Fly it off immediately.

Mistake: raiding solo. Half the heli’s firepower lives in the empty gunner seat. Bring a crew or accept you are firing blind.

Pro Tips for the Attack Helicopter

• Always fly with a gunner. The targeting diamond and the turret are the whole reason to own one. A duo is worth far more than two solos in two minicopters.
• Load HV rockets, not incendiary, for anti aircraft and hard targets. HV is cheaper, flatter and easier to land. Keep a few incendiary for flushing players out of wood.
• Stay low near defended bases. SAM sites cannot fire below their own height, so terrain is armour. Only climb when you have flares ready.
• Bank your flares for the exit. Getting in is easy. Getting out past the same SAMs with no flares left is how helis die.
• Build the hangar before you buy. A roof turns an 8 hour asset into a 48 hour one, and a defended door stops it being stolen while you sleep.
• Repair before every sortie. 500 fragments is nothing next to 2,250 scrap. Taking off at half health is how a survivable hit becomes a fatal one.
• Do not fly it to a raid you might lose. If the heli goes down, it goes down with the rockets in it. Cache spare boom on the ground, not in the pods.
• Grab the wreck. A destroyed attack heli drops its turret gun and leftover rockets on the ground. Shooting one down can fund your own.

Rust Attack Helicopter FAQ

Final Thoughts

The attack helicopter is the most powerful vehicle in Rust and the fastest way to hand 2,250 scrap and a pod of rockets to whoever shoots it down. The difference between those two outcomes is preparation, not luck.

Fly it with a gunner so the guns actually work. Load HV rockets and manage your flares like the finite resource they are. Build it a real hangar before you buy it, because eight hours in the open is not protection. And never take it to a fight you are not ready to lose, because when an attack heli goes down it goes down loud, and someone is always watching.

Get that right and the attack heli turns your group into the thing other players build SAM sites to keep away. Get it wrong and you will fund someone else’s air force. Either way, check the wipe clock before you spend, because none of it survives a force wipe.

Sources

• Attack Helicopter cost, 850 HP, seats, headlights, 30 per minute fuel burn, 500 tank, 16m 40s flight, up to 36 rockets, 30 flares, 500 metal fragment repair and decay timers: RustHelp, Attack Helicopter
• Air Wolf vendor prices for all four aircraft and the 100 low grade included with each: RustHelp, Airwolf Vendor
• Chin turret, rocket pods, HV and incendiary only, 6 per volley, 8 second cooldown, flares, pilot and gunner controls, spawn command and no lock: Corrosion Hour, RUST Attack Helicopter Guide
• Air Wolf shop location, the five minute purchase window and the pad clearing every vehicle on a new purchase: Corrosion Hour, RUST Air Wolf Shop
• Attack Helicopter release, the gunner seat, the point of impact targeting and the official weapon description: Facepunch, Airborne Update
• Dynamic vendor pricing applying to all NPC vendors from July 2024: Corrosion Hour, The RUST Dynamic Vendor Pricing System
• Destruction costs across HV rockets, C4, satchels, F1 grenades and explosive ammo against 850 HP: Rustly, Attack Helicopter Raid Cost
• The game itself: Facepunch Studios