Yon the clear skies over Jordan on Monday night, a British F-35 pilot made a small piece of history. Flying for four hours alongside two Typhoons, radar detected two Shahed drones. The squadron’s tactics instructor, whom The Guardian does not name, hit the drones with two Asraam missiles.
In doing so, he became the first Royal Air Force stealth fighter pilot to destroy a target in combat. The stakes were high, he said. In those scenarios, it’s easy to mistakenly hit a friendly target.
“There are a lot of US and Israeli assets coming and going from the area of operations. So I’m a little more concerned about identifying them first before we shoot, but we had a good amount of time to do that between me and the Typhoons that were in the air at the time, to get it done.”
So there was no moment of celebration, he said. The immediate priority was to turn the plane to ensure that they were not heading any further towards them. “What you’re most concerned about is making sure you’ve shot the right things. Making sure you’ve put the plane in the right places,” he said.
“It’s not a euphoric feeling of success. I just get out of the way and get back to doing the job again.”
The pilot was flying from RAF Akrotiri, the British base in Cyprus that was hit by a drone on Sunday night. Military officials believe it was deployed – likely by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon – to a hangar housing US spy planes, as part of broad regional retaliation for US and Israeli attacks on Iran.
The drone had evaded the base’s defense systems, likely due to its small size and slow speed, and the pilot said that also made its interception particularly difficult.
“Because they are so small and hard to detect, we don’t know if there are more out there and when you have to turn your plane to shoot them down, what you’re not doing is returning your radar to where they came from to try to find the next one,” he said.
But the drones it attacked, he said, were “very different” from the one that attacked the base 24 hours earlier, which could suggest they had been launched from a different adversary.
The base, which is not being used by US forces for defensive operations against Iranian retaliation, has had three possible missile alerts in the past 24 hours, when Defense Secretary John Healey visited troops there.
Each one has been a false alarm, but the high state of alert has meant there has been little time to think about the coup.
Returning home early in the morning, they drank a Keo, a local Cypriot beer, together. “We had a beer at dawn and then I had to go to bed because I was on duty the next day,” he said. “We have a pretty high operating temperature right now. So when this is all over, when it’s over, I’m sure we’ll celebrate appropriately.”
