If the pilots are recovered we probably won't hear about it from either side for hours. Iran will want to get them a mile underground before they send out the B-rolls. If recovered by the US, they will want them out of theater before anyone knows better so they can't be targeted.
The article says this is the first jet that was shot down by enemy fire this war, but this confuses me. Was the F35 that was downed a while back friendly fire or something? Are F35s not fighter jets?
Military aviators train for this, being alone behind enemy lines (look up SERE school if you’re curious, one of the craziest training courses outside of special forces) and there is a special force just for aviator recovery behind enemy lines, US AirForce Pararescue. Hopefully they’ll get the aviators back quickly, the last thing our country needs is American hostages making this ridiculous war harder to stop.
Military personnel captured as prisoners of war are not hostages. Unlike embassy personnel held hostage during the 1979 revolution, it's unclear if military POWs have any value to leverage against the US, considering how its leader feels about about "people who get captured" and "they knew what they signed up for". We're only hearing about this so the administration can get ahead of the narrative instead of Iran. Otherwise, it's doing everything it can to hide information about the cost of war in terms of monetary cost and casualties.
The hostages here are the so-called "allies" in the Arab world who received no notice of the invasion and were sitting ducks for wide-scale regional retaliation from Iran due to them hosting US bases.
Wouldn’t it be wiser and more considerate to your fellow soldiers to pull your side arm and go out like a man. Unless you’re able to nose dive into the ground to minimize the chances of useful parts/intel being recovered by the enemy?
Poor choice of words. Hostage taking is illegal, but any captured US aviators would be prisoners of war, whose detention is entirely legal as long as they're treated humanely.
If the US military would like this war to stop they could not fight it, that would be pretty easy I think. Probably not without consequences, but that would show actual courage. Whereas dropping bombs on civilian from afar shows zero.
This is the dumbest, most pointless military conflict in American history. There is nothing plausible to win, but we can conceivably lose everything. A pyric victory is among the most favorable outcomes. We are led by corrupt imbeciles. I can only hope the outcome includes regime change for the U.S.
They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.
Probably because their air defenses were too busy getting shot to shit.
There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.
Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.
It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.
I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.
Maybe they've been taking down jets the entire time and you've simply been lied to and the situation on the ground is different than what you believe.
CENTCOM tweeted that no shootdown occurred only for Iran to show the wreckage and one of the ejection seats. CENTCOM said Iran didn't shoot down the F-35, but it apparently crashed in Saudi Arabia and we sent out a Chinook to run search patterns to find it.
CENTCOM claimed a single Kuwait (ghost of Kuwait?) shot down three different F-15s by accident, but those planes were close enough to Iran that they could have been targeted by Iran (which seems more likely than the massive chain of mistakes required for the Kuwaiti shootdown to happen).
CENTCOM also only talks about US planes shot down and excludes Israeli F-15 that have been hit. CENTCOM also doesn't count all the very expensive drones that have been shot down, but their total value is at least a half-billion dollars.
Finally, CENTCOM is straight-up lying about air superiority. They claimed they'd switched to gravity bombs, but people instantly noticed that all the planes going up were using long-range JASSM stand-off missiles so they don't have to actually go very far inside Iran and can keep their planes in a safer section of the country. CENTCOM loaded up a B-52 with JDAMs and took a couple pictures, but all the pictures after that photo-op still show super-expensive JASSM (costing as much as $1.6M each).
If our planes never enter their airspace, there's nothing for them to shoot down. I'd note they've also shot down a couple of JASSM missiles which is interesting itself as the radar cross-section of a JASSM is believed to be pretty close to an F-35.
Iran is currently using bongo trucks with an IRST and a couple missiles that can even loiter in the air if there's no target. Being electro-optically guided means they are passive and the human element makes them a lot less likely to miss due to chaff.
These little trucks can hide ANYWHERE and because they aren't a massive multi-vehicle setup like a Patriot or S-300, they should be able to relocate often and quickly (they might even be able to stay mobile while in operation). This mobility combined, ability to hide as a normal truck, and completely passive sensors make them almost impossible to find and destroy.
If you're suggesting that the US submarine should have rescued the survivors - with respect I think you don't understand how submarines work. They have no capability to perform rescue operations. They have no way to handle mass numbers of injuries, there's normally just one corpsman (basically a medic) on board. Even if they want to do a rescue operation they have no place to put them. Subs barely have room for their own crew; typically 2 or even 3 sailors share the same bed.
dang moved the comment from those threads to here, so the discussion is empty. I'm not sure if the press coverage has more info. (My guess is that they are quite similar.)
During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement. At the time, Baghdad was known to have the highest density of SAM protection out of any city in the world.
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
It seems like the Iraqis were relatively poor operators of their systems. A few days ago I was reading about the Nato bombing of yugoslavia on wikipedia and it had the following entry:
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
> During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement.
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
You can't really take out "the whole" air defense system because there will always be folks out with MANPAD-type things, those will score hits on occasion. That's probably what we saw here. I doubt MANPADs were nearly as common in the early 90s as they are today.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
Iraq is pretty flat on the routes between the US-allied countries and the major strongholds (Basra, Baghdad). You can't easily conceal rocket launchers there.
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
1) The US has run 13,000 missions over Iran in the last month. Thats a lot of targets.
2) The initial US degradation of Iraqi capabilities was much much greater in gulf war 1.
3) F15s are not stealth fighters.
4) This is 35 years later.
5) "strategic bombing" of air defenses is mostly accomplished with our cruise missiles. We'll take out any air defenses we find, but you don't fly non-stealth planes over SAM batteries intentionally.
We haven't even started a ground campaign. If one plane is downed per 13000 missions, I think we're doing ok.
You can't compare time, you need to compare sorties. There were only 5900 F15 sorties during the gulf war. It's not clear how many of the 8000 combat sorties sorties flown so far in the Iran war are with F15s, but it's almost certainly several thousand. Overall during the gulf war coalition forces suffered 52 fixed wing aircraft lost in combat over approximately 116,000 combat sorties.
Given Iran ought to have far better SAM systems than Iraq 35 years ago, this comparison doesn't seem in any way alarming.
For a more direct comparison, in the first 5 weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia flew approximately 7000 combat sorties and 22 fixed wing aircraft were shot down.
That's because they primarily sent stealth aircraft and Tomahawks over Baghdad. They also used decoys to draw out SAM missiles, and then F-4s would strike the SAM sites directly, which over time meant that the surviving SAM launchers did not fire when targets made themselves known. However, they did do some non-stealth missions. The most well know was Package Q, which involved dozens of aircraft, and two F-16s were shot down.
The thing about the First Gulf War was that it was four months of buildup, 45 days achieving air superiority, and about 100 hours of a ground war. It was well planned, and involved a collation of of forces that shared a common purpose and common goal. The allied coalition made sure to get their intelligence correct and worked hard to disassemble the Iraqi defenses before sending the armed forces into real danger.
The current conflict involved Donald Trump thinking that Iran, a nation of 93 million people with a relatively healthy economy (at least at the national and regime level, which can sell a lot of petroleum), was going to put up the same kind of fight that Iraq did, then a nation of 18 million with old tech, or like Venezuela did, a nation of perhaps 30 million today, that has faced extended total economic collapse, hyper inflation, and a mass exodus of something like a quarter of the population over the past 6-10 years. There was virtually no planning, with initial action going off of intelligence of where Khomeini would be and just jumping at that.
We've got an administration run by a narcissist that has surrounded himself with sycophants and bottom feeders. He's pissed off every ally we have, acted prematurely as the aggressor with an assassination strike, and now doesn't have the resources to protect the strategic assets in the region let alone convince Iran that the conflict needs to end in our favor. Just a ridiculous number of unforced errors. A complete embarrassment.
They've been flying straight into sites that would normally be heavily defended with 4th gen airframes, it's not that surprising that Iran finally managed to get one
It's difficult to compare; but Iran today is not Iraq then. F-15s are now based on a design that's 30 years older. Shoulder launched SAMs have moved on.
I'm not sure what happened here, but in the Gulf War, there was a move to medium altitudes after a dodgy first night and I've seen some footage that, if accurate and if I'm not getting it wrong, suggests there are different tactics going on here.
We have attacked their “legacy” air defense systems. We cannot really degrade their ability to use their anti-aircraft loitering missiles which don’t rely on radar.
46 airplanes were shot down during the second Iraqi war, and there has been over 150 total aviation losses (mechanical failure).
So far we have lost seven airplanes. There's no deep meaning behind one F-15e being shot down (if that's what happened): it's not a stealth aircraft and it's not heavily armored.
145 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics/us-fighter-jet-iran
"U.S. Conducting Rescue Operation After Jet Went Down Over Iran"
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5150259-u-s-air-force-su...
Military personnel captured as prisoners of war are not hostages. Unlike embassy personnel held hostage during the 1979 revolution, it's unclear if military POWs have any value to leverage against the US, considering how its leader feels about about "people who get captured" and "they knew what they signed up for". We're only hearing about this so the administration can get ahead of the narrative instead of Iran. Otherwise, it's doing everything it can to hide information about the cost of war in terms of monetary cost and casualties.
The hostages here are the so-called "allies" in the Arab world who received no notice of the invasion and were sitting ducks for wide-scale regional retaliation from Iran due to them hosting US bases.
Poor choice of words. Hostage taking is illegal, but any captured US aviators would be prisoners of war, whose detention is entirely legal as long as they're treated humanely.
“He’s not a war hero ... I like people who weren’t captured.”
If the US military would like this war to stop they could not fight it, that would be pretty easy I think. Probably not without consequences, but that would show actual courage. Whereas dropping bombs on civilian from afar shows zero.
You've picked a high bar there.
There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.
Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.
It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.
I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.
CENTCOM tweeted that no shootdown occurred only for Iran to show the wreckage and one of the ejection seats. CENTCOM said Iran didn't shoot down the F-35, but it apparently crashed in Saudi Arabia and we sent out a Chinook to run search patterns to find it.
CENTCOM claimed a single Kuwait (ghost of Kuwait?) shot down three different F-15s by accident, but those planes were close enough to Iran that they could have been targeted by Iran (which seems more likely than the massive chain of mistakes required for the Kuwaiti shootdown to happen).
CENTCOM also only talks about US planes shot down and excludes Israeli F-15 that have been hit. CENTCOM also doesn't count all the very expensive drones that have been shot down, but their total value is at least a half-billion dollars.
Finally, CENTCOM is straight-up lying about air superiority. They claimed they'd switched to gravity bombs, but people instantly noticed that all the planes going up were using long-range JASSM stand-off missiles so they don't have to actually go very far inside Iran and can keep their planes in a safer section of the country. CENTCOM loaded up a B-52 with JDAMs and took a couple pictures, but all the pictures after that photo-op still show super-expensive JASSM (costing as much as $1.6M each).
If our planes never enter their airspace, there's nothing for them to shoot down. I'd note they've also shot down a couple of JASSM missiles which is interesting itself as the radar cross-section of a JASSM is believed to be pretty close to an F-35.
Iran is currently using bongo trucks with an IRST and a couple missiles that can even loiter in the air if there's no target. Being electro-optically guided means they are passive and the human element makes them a lot less likely to miss due to chaff.
These little trucks can hide ANYWHERE and because they aren't a massive multi-vehicle setup like a Patriot or S-300, they should be able to relocate often and quickly (they might even be able to stay mobile while in operation). This mobility combined, ability to hide as a normal truck, and completely passive sensors make them almost impossible to find and destroy.
I do wonder if Iran finds them first, will they treat them better than the US treated survivors of the ship sunk by a US torpedo in the Indiana Ocean?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627182
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
2) The initial US degradation of Iraqi capabilities was much much greater in gulf war 1.
3) F15s are not stealth fighters.
4) This is 35 years later.
5) "strategic bombing" of air defenses is mostly accomplished with our cruise missiles. We'll take out any air defenses we find, but you don't fly non-stealth planes over SAM batteries intentionally.
We haven't even started a ground campaign. If one plane is downed per 13000 missions, I think we're doing ok.
Given Iran ought to have far better SAM systems than Iraq 35 years ago, this comparison doesn't seem in any way alarming.
For a more direct comparison, in the first 5 weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia flew approximately 7000 combat sorties and 22 fixed wing aircraft were shot down.
That plus likely a miscalculation...pushing into territory that is more contested than believed
- DJT, 11 March
“I think we’ve won"
- DJT, 20 March
“We’ve won this war. The war has been won"
- DJT, 24 March
“We are winning so big"
- DJT, 25 March
Military technology moves faster than most people think.
The US has decided to step into Russia's shoes in Iran for reasons and I would be shocked if Russia/China aren't also providing similar aid for Iran.
The thing about the First Gulf War was that it was four months of buildup, 45 days achieving air superiority, and about 100 hours of a ground war. It was well planned, and involved a collation of of forces that shared a common purpose and common goal. The allied coalition made sure to get their intelligence correct and worked hard to disassemble the Iraqi defenses before sending the armed forces into real danger.
The current conflict involved Donald Trump thinking that Iran, a nation of 93 million people with a relatively healthy economy (at least at the national and regime level, which can sell a lot of petroleum), was going to put up the same kind of fight that Iraq did, then a nation of 18 million with old tech, or like Venezuela did, a nation of perhaps 30 million today, that has faced extended total economic collapse, hyper inflation, and a mass exodus of something like a quarter of the population over the past 6-10 years. There was virtually no planning, with initial action going off of intelligence of where Khomeini would be and just jumping at that.
We've got an administration run by a narcissist that has surrounded himself with sycophants and bottom feeders. He's pissed off every ally we have, acted prematurely as the aggressor with an assassination strike, and now doesn't have the resources to protect the strategic assets in the region let alone convince Iran that the conflict needs to end in our favor. Just a ridiculous number of unforced errors. A complete embarrassment.
What a clown show...
It's difficult to compare; but Iran today is not Iraq then. F-15s are now based on a design that's 30 years older. Shoulder launched SAMs have moved on.
I'm not sure what happened here, but in the Gulf War, there was a move to medium altitudes after a dodgy first night and I've seen some footage that, if accurate and if I'm not getting it wrong, suggests there are different tactics going on here.
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/missiles/358-missile-S...
So far we have lost seven airplanes. There's no deep meaning behind one F-15e being shot down (if that's what happened): it's not a stealth aircraft and it's not heavily armored.