More details of the airman rescue in Iran
There’s a host of information out there, so much that it’s hard to pick and choose what to link to or embed here. But I think this one is good in terms of details of the operation. In addition, it goes into a tie-in-with Operation Eagle Claw, Carter’s failed hostage rescue effort from 1980 (I wrote about that sad fiasco in this previous post):
ADDENDUM: Another excellent take:
Thanks, interesting. The rescue teams very Professional. Glad it went better than 46 yr ago.
Fantastic video. Thanks Neo.
What struck me was 1, the military ATC had to decongest the airspace as everyone wanted to help in the rescue. And. 2, that Trump ignored the ones counciling to not do the rescue and gave the order to go.
I keep coming back to how 50% of our population doesn’t understand such mentality and actually disparages such. What a sad state we are in. I can’t imagine such thinking during WWII.
I knew a retired Green Beret, several actually, back in the day 46 years ago. Those guys don’t just drop out, they talk to each other. They hear things. All he said was that that operation was f*cked up in many ways from the beginning.
Wretchard:
https://x.com/i/status/2041284291192304063
Follow the link to Wretchard’s own link to the fuller FoxNews report by Trey Yingst.
To fill in a bit, it’s a story of B-2s and MOPs striking an underground IRGC bunker killing a heap of highup bad guys.
Chuck:
Are you talking about Eagle Claw 1980, or the present operation?
The fact that the second airman had not been rescued was leaked to Israeli channel 12. This is a treasonous act that could have gotten the American airman and or rescuers killed. The leak was almost certainly from within the US or Israel governments. Either way, the government should put much effort to identify and bring the leaker to trial.
The Max Afterburner vid is amazing. I think I had heard of the aircraft name “Dash 8” but I didn’t really remember anything about it. STOL performance is the key in this case, but I was surprised to see, it is just a small passenger aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8#/media/File:De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-8-102_Dash_8,_NorOntair_AN1305956.jpg
The DASH-8 is commonly used in the Caribbean, where island taxi services are very common and short runways are, too. It’s a very dependable aircraft.
Captain Steve, at 18:00, tells a story from his own career that puts a human face on the intense effort that goes into all Search and Rescue Operations. It is a very sober, and somber, look into the commitment of the members of those teams.
“Are you going to be worth it?”
A long rant but makes some important points.
Very little of it will be new to Neo’s readers, but Strom did a good job of bringing together a lot of evidence for his conclusion.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/04/06/rescue-of-f-15-wso-reveals-huge-cultural-divide-between-left-and-right-europe-and-america-n3813577
Strom links this tweet by Cdr. Salamander, who is well known here, replying to one of the Orwellian crowing about our “losses”.
Another tweet Strom linked, in that irritating shortened format that forces you to go look in order to read the whole thing, while the post’s author tacitly assumes that you did exactly that.
I detest composition by truncated tweets.
This one references the coordinated dropping of “news reports” based on Trump calling a lid on press availabilities in midmorning.
https://x.com/jackunheard/status/2040662695293104387
As reported ad nauseum, no one in the Regime Media complained about Biden when he closed the lid early pretty much every day he wasn’t actually away from the White House. Usually he never even opening the jar.
My local paper featured this rescue operation on page 9 of a 15 page “newspaper”. The article was blah at best. Like this OP was no big deal, Orange man bad trope. This indifference has been SOP for quite some time, so… I recently subscribed on a trial basis to the California Post, which featured this rescue operation on page 1 – 5, in full color, with beaming pride and in exquisite detail.
I find the disparity shameful and intend on unsubscribing from the local paper ASAP.
What, it seems to me, is overlooked is how you coordinate to within a gnat’s eyelash, multiple units all used to operating on their own hook according to immediate circumstances.
Takes a lot of work and a lot of thought.
RA: 5D Chess, eh? Very probably it was a cluster $%^& of an attempt to set up a FOB to try for Natanz and they were ambushed. Whoever heard of losing that many air frames just to rescue one WSO? Multiple C130s? It’s a one, max two Pave Hawk job.
Oh Lord, another armchair general, counting the beans and deciding that hardware is more important than a WSO as hostage/victim.
Wobbly.
@MAGA Man
According to whom?
Since when has the Iranian regime succeeded in ambushing us at any point in this conflict? They’ve done so before, in prior conflicts. But notably not now. We and the Israelis are very, very firmly in their OODA loop and they have had to dash just to try and NOT get punked.
Uh, apparently we lost a max of three airframes and no casualties, and that’s well within acceptable losses.
Equipment can be replaced but a well trained pilot is invaluable.
Three airframes? Normal day in Vietnam. It is astonishing how few air assets have been lost. The most costly was the AWACS. I remember back in my Boeing air defense days being told “ if you don’t sell another AWACS soon we are shutting down the 707 line forever.” The 707 line was very inefficient spread over multiple floors in multiple buildings.
Boeing bought the DASH 8 but couldn’t make it profitable. Boeing selected CATIA from Dassault Systèmes as the CAD system for planes to meet the offset requirement for France buying AWACS. Our own in-house system under development was then dumped on DHC before selling them off to Bombardier.
Wikipedia “ Allegations of secret commissions paid to Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney are today known as the Airbus affair.”