A beer at sunrise then back on duty – the British pilot who made RAF history shooting down Iranian drones | Royal Air Force
IIn the clear skies over Jordan on Monday night, a British F-35 pilot made a little history. Flying alongside the two Typhoons for four hours, the radar detected two Shahed drones. The squadron tactical instructor, who the Guardian did not name, shot down the drones with two Asraam missiles.
In doing so, he became the first pilot of the Royal Air Force’s stealth fighter aircraft to destroy a target in combat. He said it was too high a risk. In these scenarios it is easy to accidentally hit a friendly target.
“There’s a lot of assets going back and forth to the area of operations from America, from Israel. So I’m a little bit more concerned about identifying it before we do any shooting, but we had good time to do that with the Typhoons that were in the air at the time.”
“There were no moments of celebration then,” he said. The immediate priority was to turn the plane around to make sure no more people were heading towards them. “You’re more worried about making sure you’re hitting the right thing. Making sure you’re placing the plane in the right places,” he said.
“It’s not a euphoric feeling of accomplishment. I just get out of the way and keep doing the work again.”
The pilot was flying from RAF Akrotiri, a British base in Cyprus, when he was shot down by a drone on Sunday night. Military officials believe it was likely deployed by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon toward a hangar housing U.S. spy planes as part of broader regional retaliation for U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran.
The drone had evaded the base’s defense systems, likely due to its small size and low speed, making it particularly difficult to intercept, the pilot said.
“Because they’re so small and hard to detect, we don’t know if there are more out there, and when you have to turn your plane around to shoot them down, what you don’t do is point your radar back to where they came from and try to find the next one,” he said.
But he said the drones he shot down were “very different” from those that hit the base 24 hours earlier, which could indicate they were launched by a different enemy.
The base, which is not used by US forces for defensive operations against Iranian retaliation, was subject to three possible missile alerts in the past 24 hours as Defense Secretary John Healey visited troops there.
Each was a false alarm, but the high alert status meant there was little time to dwell on the hit.
When they returned home in the early hours, they drank Keo, a local Cypriot beer, together. “We had a beer at sunrise and the next day I had to go to bed because I was on duty,” he said. “We’re at a pretty high operational tempo right now. So when it’s all said and done, I’m sure we’ll celebrate appropriately.”
