Lakenheath, England (CNN) – When F-15 fighter pilot Major Benjamin “Irish” Coffey launched his jet one night last spring, he did not expect to be left without missiles to combat a massive Iranian attack on Israel.
It was April 13th and Iran had fired more than 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, a much larger attack than the American military had anticipated. Instructed to use every weapon at their disposal to help defeat the attack, Coffey and his crewmate, weapons systems officer Captain Lacie “Sonic” Hester, devised a plan.
In their first interviews since that night, Hester and Coffey described to CNN what it was like to fly as close as possible to an Iranian drone, well below the minimum safe altitude for the F-15 Strike Eagle, and to have used a weapon – an extremely difficult maneuver. dangerous in total darkness, against a barely visible target. They failed.
“We felt the ground falling, we felt closer and closer to the ground,” Coffey confesses to CNN. “The risk was too high to try again.”
Ultimately, American forces in the air and at sea, including Hester and Coffey, intercepted 70 drones and three ballistic missiles that night. The attack was largely thwarted.
But F-15 fighter pilots, weapons managers and ground crew who participated in the operation and spoke to CNN described feeling at times overwhelmed as they fought off the Iranian attack, which was the Air Force’s first real test. against a prolonged and large-scale drone attack. The fighters spent hours in the air that night.
The situation at an undisclosed American military base in the Middle East was equally chaotic, with the base’s air defenses shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and troops being herded into bunkers.
Air Force personnel, like the rest of the world, were waiting and preparing for the expected Iranian attack, a retaliation for Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed several members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“When we were getting instructions to fly that night, we still had no idea,” Hester recalls to CNN. “It could have just been a failure — just another flying mission in a circle, waiting for it to happen.”
Fighter pilots hadn’t had much time to train, explains Lieutenant Colonel Timothy “Diesel” Causey, also an F-15 pilot.
Attack drones “are low cost and low risk for the enemy to employ. They can be sent in large quantities and we have to fight them to protect civilians and our allies”, continues Causey to CNN. “We hadn’t started practicing on a large scale yet.”
The attack showed how the military will have to face a new generation of warfare that pits multimillion-dollar fighter jets against cheap, slow attack drones that can easily evade highly sophisticated radar systems.
“We’re talking about something that’s at the edge of a fighter jet’s detection capabilities — what we call ‘find, fix, track, target and strike,’” says Coffey. “The best radar in the inventory is on this plane behind us, and no one really knew if its ability to find these [drones] existed or not.”
Another challenge: fighters’ most effective weapons against drones quickly ran out. The F-15E Strike Eagle can only carry eight air-to-air missiles at a time.
“That night, the mission was to shoot down the drones with every weapon we had available to protect our ally,” says F-15 pilot Lt. Col. Curtis ‘Voodoo’ Culver. “We ran out of missiles very quickly… 20 minutes, maybe.”
Once the missiles were exhausted, the next task was even more daunting: landing on the US military base, while Iranian missiles and drones intercepted by the base’s Patriot air defense systems exploded overhead and rained debris onto the runways.
Some of the fighters, including Coffey’s and Hester’s, had to land with a “missile hover” – an emergency situation in which a missile is fired but malfunctions and is not actually launched.
“This missile – we don’t know if it’s armed, and we don’t know if it’s going to explode on our wing,” says Coffey. “We don’t know if it will explode while maintenance is protecting the plane. It’s a big problem. And now, as we begin the landing process, we go into red alarm.”
The base had essentially gone into lockdown, signaling an imminent attack.
“Missiles and drones are flying over the base, and they are being intercepted over the base, so the red alarm goes off,” recalls Causey. “So at that point, that’s really when we see a lot of military discipline and a lot of bravery under fire.”
When the pilots tried to land at the base, they saw explosions in the air and called in F-15 pilot Clayton “Rifle” Wicks, also a major, who was managing jet operations on the ground at the time.
“Really, all we could tell them was to stay in the air as long as possible with the fuel they had,” Wicks explains to CNN. “Don’t divert, because even our diversion airfields – we don’t know what’s going on there either, so if things are exploding over our heads, most likely things are exploding there too.”
Troops on the ground were advised to head to the bunkers, but many did not, remaining focused on getting the jets back in the air to continue the fight.
“At one point, there was an airman standing next to a fuel truck with tons and tons of fuel, pumping gas into the jet, with things exploding over the base,” says Culver. “The courage of that airman, that American, to stand up and do this for an ally, is incredible.”
Many of the F-15 pilots and air and ground crews who participated in the operation that night received valor awards this week. Hester and Coffey were awarded the Silver Star, the third highest military decoration for valor in combat. Wicks received the Bronze Star, which recognizes acts of heroism performed in ground combat. And Causey and Culver received the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, the military’s highest decoration for extraordinary aerial feats.
For Culver, the night was a symbol of how much things have changed for fighter pilots.
“In Vietnam, Robin Olds shot down MiG-15s over the Red River”, he points out, referring to the famous fighter pilot who shot down 17 enemy planes in the Vietnam War.
“This is man against man, person against person, one is trying to kill the other,” he continues. “And that’s the difference. We began to understand that each of these drones was not trying to kill us in the jet, but that potentially loss of civilian life was at risk. We were trying to save innocent lives from that aerial threat. And that is the new nature of this fight.”
