@Cali:
An F-15E did this in Iraq irl. They picked the chopper up from about 50 miles away.
I remember reading about this…Link: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/a-brief-history-of-weird-shoot-downs-7a5bd5019563
Here’s the story, with a twist…
February 1991 & September 2009: U.S. Air Force F-15E versus Iraqi Hughes 500 & Air Force MQ-9
As the Gulf War aerial campaign expanded, an Air Force F-15E bomber crew—Tim Bennett and Dan Bakke—targeted an Iraqi Hughes 500 helicopter while the copter was on the ground at its air base. As a laser-guided bomb arced down, the helicopter took off.
The America fliers kept the F-15’s laser pointed at the helicopter, continuing to guide the bomb. The munition passed directly through the Hughes’ rotor disc, destroying the helicopter. An American Special Forces team on the ground witnessed the unlikely aerial kill.
Eighteen years later, the same F-15E, of course flown by a different crew, was on patrol over Afghanistan when a U.S. MQ-9 drone malfunctioned and stopped responding to its operators on the ground. The F-15 crew fired a Sidewinder missile, destroying the rogue robot before it could cross into another country’s airspace.