Live updates: US rescues 1 of 2 crew members from fighter jet downed over Iran, sources say | CNN

When a US Air Force fighter crew is forced to eject, particularly over hostile territory, “everyone” in the military operations center overseeing the mission shifts their focus to finding and recovering the crew members as quickly as possible, a retired Air Force C-17 pilot and former Director of the Personnel Recovery Center in Iraq in 2008, told CNN.

“People are pushing assets to help provide air cover for their rescue efforts, you have intelligence capabilities that are identifying the location of a potential crash site, and then you have people that are willing to provide strike and fires that are supporting the rescue forces,” said Dr. Ravi Chaudhary, who also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment in the Biden administration. “So it is a huge, huge orchestration and mobilization just to ensure that we get our people home.”

CNN reported Friday that one of the US crew members from a downed F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet has been rescued. The status of the second crew member is not clear. F-15s typically carry both a pilot and a weapon systems officer as part of its two-man crew.

The crew members go through extensive training for not only how to safely eject, but how to survive once they’ve landed in hostile territory. The two-man crew typically ejects “almost simultaneously,” though it’s not uncommon to be separated from one another based on wind and other factors once they are out of the aircraft and their parachutes have opened.

The personnel recovery team “has very, very sophisticated ways” of finding not only the aircraft that has crashed, but the crew, Chaudhary said.

For the crew, getting to a safe location immediately and making sure you are “known to rescue forces, either visually or by communications,” is crucial, Chaudhary said. “The critical part is doing that without compromising your position to hostile forces”

The training used in these scenarios is called SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. The first step, survival, tells the service member to ensure physically they are okay after the landing, check their equipment, and get to a safe location as quickly as possible. The second step, evasion, includes “a number of tactics to lower your profile,” Chaudhary said, and avoid potentially hostile forces or civilians in order to make contact with the rescue team.

“I’d be willing to bet that while our first crew member was rescued, nobody’s going home until we get our second crew member,” Chaudhary said. “And to me, that’s the heart of what these men and women do, and they’re doing this at great, great risk.”