U.S. forces safely rescued the second F-15E crew member of a two-seat fighter jet that went down over Iran on Friday, two U.S. officials said late Saturday.
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Details of the rescue were unavailable, but the sources said the second airman was pulled from Iran safely, with rescue crews also out of harm’s way.
“He sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” President Donald Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social.
The plane’s pilot was located shortly after the crash.
Rescue crews and other special operation forces had been searching for the second airman, known as the backseater or weapons systems officer, since Friday.
Iran shot down the F-15E Strike Eagle, a U.S. official said, and the American military was scrambling to find the second aviator after a regional governor offered a bounty for its crew.
Iran’s media published photos alongside claims from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that it had shot down the F-15E. Nour News, an outlet linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said the jet “was destroyed in the skies over central Iran by a new advanced air defense system of the IRGC Aerospace Force.”
This is the first time it appears that a U.S. aircraft has gone down inside Iran as part of this latest conflict, dispelling the notion that the U.S. has complete control over the Iranian airspace. In recent days, the U.S. has ramped up the number of bombing runs over the country.
A regional governor in Iran’s southwest had issued a public plea Friday for locals to find those on board the F-15E and promised a reward, according to official and semi-official Iranian news organizations; a representative of merchants and businesses was reportedly offering the equivalent of $60,000.
A governor of Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province earlier denied reports that the second American crew member had been arrested.
The governor also denied that the first pilot had been rescued, calling it a “tactic of the enemy.”
In a brief phone interview on Friday, President Donald Trump declined to discuss specifics of the rescue operation. When asked if Iran’s actions would negatively affect any negotiations to end the war, the president said, “No, not at all. No, it’s war.”
Iran has claimed previously to have struck American military planes, but the U.S. has not confirmed any such incidents during the war.
A U.S. aircraft that was mobilized to support the search and rescue mission was also struck by Iranian fire after the F-15E jet was downed, a U.S. official told NBC News Friday.
That aircraft, a single-pilot A-10 Thunderbolt, known as a Warthog, made it to Kuwaiti airspace, where the pilot ejected and the aircraft crashed, the official said. The pilot is safe and the A-10 is down in Kuwait, according to the official.
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