It's very unlikely the drone hit the Apache on purpose. Why ? Because these drones are not guided remotely by an operator once they are launched. They are akin to cruise missiles. There is experimentation in Russia for drones with anti-air missiles but that's very much an exception.

So the most likely scenarios are :

• The Apache tried to down the drone and either collided or was hit by debris of the drone.
• The Apache was very unlucky and got hit by the drone cruising to its programmed destination.

Either way, it is very unlikely the Iranian drone was remotely guided to hit the Apache.

Furthermore this was in the middle of the night making it difficult for an Apache to avoid collision. They were using NVG to navigate at that time of the day in this region. Also the pilots managed to ditch in the Detroit of Ormuz without getting very injured, since there isn't an ejection seat on Apache that means their helicopter was not heavily damaged by the drone hit. If the military payload had really exploded on hit, the Apache would have been much more damaged and would be unlikely to protect the pilots and let them ditch in the sea and escape.

The rescue mission was done by an unmanned sea drone which indicates that the US army wasn't confident in sending airplanes or other helicopters to the rescue zone. So it is possible that there was risks for Iranian anti-air to shoot down an air rescue mission.

So no, it's most likely not cope. If you look on the shaheed drone specs, it is not designed to destroy aircraft and are akin to "dumb and slow cruise missiles".

I'm no expert in weaponry but if anyone is interested I based this comment on this video :

https://youtu.be/LdWiFQ7Djqw

(Only in french as far as i can tell, sorry)

It's from Ate Chuet, a retired french army jet pilot that did missions in this area and has experience shooting down shaheed drones.

Was it a confirmed direct hit? Might have been that the Apache was on drone defense duty and the Shahed shrapnel after interception got an lucky/unlucky hit - that's actually much more likely than succeeding in hitting an Apache with an Shahed on purpose. Shaheds are pretty bad at hitting fast moving targets - they mainly get preprogrammed paths to follow. There are remote control variants in Russia to enable live tracking of faster targets, but even then an Apache has a huge maneuverability advantage, and Shaheds are slow in comparison to most anti-air missiles.

I find it unlikely a shahed drone can intentionally hit a moving helicopter. They're more meant for things like military bases

With drones everywhere an accident is going to happen once in a while. Pilots can make mistakes, equipment fails, or sometimes shit just happens. It's not that crazy.