The "pirate euro chopper", as it is seen in Frigate
The Pirate stealth helicopter was designed by the French navy and is carried on board the frigate 'La Fayette'. It is immune to all forms of electromagnetic interference, which makes it vital to Janus Crime Syndicate's plot to steal the GoldenEye satellites. Janus attacks the frigate and takes its crew hostage, they plan to steal the helicopter and sink the ship to make it look like the helicopter sank along with it. Bond needs to infiltrate the frigate, rescue the hostages and disarm the bombs. He also needs to plant a tracker bug on the Pirate to relay location data of this helicopter to the MI6 in order to figure out what Janus intends to use the helicopter for.
Janus later uses the helicopter to safely escape the GoldenEye's blast after firing on Severnaya, but this is never depicted in-game; Bond's second encounter with the Pirate is in the St. Petersburg statue park. Janus attaches a proximity-triggered 3-minute time bomb (After triggering from proximity, lowers to 15 seconds) to it in an attempt to kill Bond and Natalya. At Janus' Depot, Bond must recover blueprints that show Janus was planning on mass-producing the helicopter to finance their operations.
Appearances[]
Notes[]
- The Pirate is the Eurocopter EC665 Tiger Attack Helicopter in the film, though the version seen in the La Fayette scene is a prototype model, and all other models seen in the film are special effects/CGI. Most likely the name was changed due to the same copyright fears that sparked the weapon name changes; on the model itself, "Eurocopter" is changed to "Euro Chopper."
- The Pirate barely resembles a Eurocopter Tiger and appears to have actually been based on the AH-64 Apache.
- The Pirate was originally supposed to take off at some point during the frigate mission.
- In the level Statue, the Pirate is hidden outside the gates at the start of the level until it is needed; this is why rotors can be heard near the gate before it appears.
- The three minute fuse could have been based off of the scene in the movie, where Bond sets the timer to 3 minutes rather then 6. It may have been that because of Trevelyan's influence of his (kind-of) revenge on Bond.