EX-17 Heligun

The EX-17 Heligun is a two barrel 7.62x51mm NATO calibre machine gun. The weapon is gas-operated and was developed by Hughes Aircraft for use in the OH-6 recon helicopter.

Overview
The Heligun was developed by Hughes Aircraft as part of a complete package for the OV-6 recon helicopter. It offered a number of significant advantages over the Minigun – it was half the weight, self-powered (not electrically driven), and had a higher 6000RPM firing rate. Ultimately, it was not adopted because the reliability (mean time between stoppages) couldn’t quite be brought up to par, and Army officials decided that it didn’t offer enough improvement over the already adopted M134 Minigun to be worth the switch.