The F-117 was America’s first, super secret, stealth fighter. The aircraft is now retired and the shoot down of Vega 31 over Serbia has a lot to do with that.
On March 27, 1999, a radio call went into the night: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I’m Vega 31, on the way down.” An enemy missile system had downed the American stealthfighter, an event that would reverberate through the halls of the Pentagon. The pilot was floating down over the Serbian landscape. He landed in a field and took shelter in a ditch for seven hours. Incredibly, his equipment was archaic, an old technology line of sight radio and an infrared strobe that didn’t work. He was also armed with a 9mm handgun with two extra magazines.
Serbian troops immediately began looking for him and reveled at the aircraft crash site.
“I took off from Aviano Air Base, Italy. I flew the F-117 to the target and dropped two 2,000-lb. laser-guided weapons on a very specific target in the Belgrade area. I came off the target 20 nautical miles northwest of Belgrade when it happened,” reported Defense Media Network.
The U.S. Air Force rescue package in Italy immediately sprang into action. Two MH-53J Pave Lows and one MH-60G Pave Hawk launched and were enroute in minutes. An A-10 attack aircraft was the on-scene commander but was having trouble staying overhead due to weather. The pilot was eventually authenticated, but again, incredibly, in the age of GPS, the pilot could not be located immediately.
“I had an idea geographically where the SAR dot was. I made a guess and when I checked my GPS – it took a while for that sucker to connect to the satellite – and the SAR dot was in the GPS. It told me I was 39 degrees and 101 miles from the SAR dot. So when I came up, I said that. This made a big difference because the rescue people had a lot of ideas as to where I was.”
Unfortunately for the downed pilot, his infrared strobe to pinpoint his location was inoperative. Once the helicopters were in the general area, he chose to set off a standard flare in the very dark night. This told the rescue force where he was but also alerted the Serbs to his location. The rescue crews were also worried about whether or not the pilot had been captured and if they were being led to an ambush. Speaking over an unsecure radio, the helicopters made the decision to make a run for it and attempt to pick up the pilot with Serb troops only a few hundred yards away.
“We’d spent the whole night trying to get to this point – the pick-up. Now, we were unable to spot him. It was extremely dark. We were expecting an infrared strobe. We were talking to him. We knew he was close. We made a couple of passes trying to find him, our three helicopters spread out in a loose formation so we could maneuver as necessary, and could not see him. We saw some trucks near him. But we could not see his strobe. We had no way to know it wasn’t working,” said the lead helicopter aircraft commander.
“That was the longest 30 seconds I ever spent on the ground,” Franks (MH-60G pilot) said. “When he lit off his flare, we were right on top of him, so we did an autorotation down on top of him. Then, we came into a hover because we’d made a deal with our pararescue jumpers, or PJs, that we would always keep the survivor out at the one o’clock position. By this time, we were sure this was our F-117 pilot, but going on in the back of my mind was the idea that it might have been him, but he might have been in a Serb trap.”
The trip back to Italy was uneventful.
