In the clear skies above Jordan on Monday night, a British F-35 pilot made a small piece of history. Flying for four hours alongside two Typhoons, the radar picked up two Shahed drones. The squadron tactics instructor – whom the Guardian is not naming – hit the drones with two Asraam missiles.
In doing so he became the first pilot of the Royal Air Force’s stealth fighter jets to destroy a target in combat. It was, he said, very high stakes. In those scenarios, it is easy to hit a friendly target by mistake.
“There’s a lot of assets from America, from Israel that are going to and from area of operations. So I’m a little bit more concerned about identifying it first before taking any shots, but we had good time to do that between me and the Typhoons that were airborne at the time, to get that done.”
There was no moment of celebration then, he said. The immediate priority was to turn the aircraft to make sure no more were heading their way. “You are kind of more concerned about making sure you’ve shot the right thing. Making sure you positioned the aircraft in the right places,” he said.
“It’s not a euphoric sense of success. I just get out the way and get back on to doing the job again.”
The pilot, technically a Royal Navy 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 – probably by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon – towards a hangar housing US spy planes, as part of the wide regional retaliations for the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
The drone had evaded defence systems on the base, probably because of its small size and low speed, and the pilot said that also made his interception particularly difficult.
“Because they’re so small and difficult to detect, we don’t know if there’s any more out there and when you have to turn your aircraft around to shoot them down, what you’re not doing is turning your radar back to where they came from to try and find the next,” he said.
But the drones he hit, he said, were “very different” from the one that hit the base 24 hours earlier, which might suggest they had been launched from a different adversary.
The base, which is not being used by US forces for defensive operations against Iran’s retaliation, has had three potential missile alerts over the past 24 hours, as the defence secretary, John Healey, visited troops there.
Each has been a false alarm, but the high state of alert has meant there has been little time to dwell on the hit.
Returning home in the early hours, they drank a Keo together, a local Cypriot beer. “We have one beer at sunrise and then I had to go to bed because I was on duty the next day,” he said. “We’re kind of a pretty high operational temp at the moment. So when this is all over whenever it ends and then I’m sure we’ll celebrate appropriately.”
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