60 minutes to save a pilot behind enemy lines
NEW YORK // When Jordanian air force pilot Maaz Al Kassasbeh ejected from his F-16 above ISIL-controlled Raqqa last December, his chances of evading capture — and thus of survival — began to diminish rapidly after an hour.
Combat search and rescue veterans call this the “golden hour” after a pilot is downed behind enemy lines, when the chances for rescue and surviving injuries are greatest. But in truth, the Jordanian airman probably had even less time. It was daytime and the nearest populated areas were held by ISIL; beyond that was the open desert.
The US launched an “intensive airborne search” operation immediately after the plane went down, according to a State Department spokeswoman, who declined to give any details on how long it took the aircraft to arrive. That is likely because the nearest search and rescue units were more than 1,100 kilometres away, on a military base in Kuwait.
“Not having a rescue package nearby could have cost the pilot his capture,” said Brandon Webb, a former Navy Seal and author of a forthcoming book, Among Heroes. “Flying … from Kuwait is a half day travel by helicopter, that’s an eternity in a CSAR [combat search and rescue] operation.”
Even with the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, designed to fly faster than conventional rescue helicopters, it would have taken more than two hours to reach Raqqa.
ISIL is known to have shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that are effective at lower altitudes, but their capabilities are nothing like Saddam Hussein’s air defences that were able to shoot down more than two dozen US aircraft during the first Gulf War. The US-led coalition bombing ISIL has flown more than 2,230 missions over Iraq and Syria, and Kassasbeh is the only pilot to have been captured.
But the failure to rescue the airman soon after his crash, and the apparent lack of coalition quick-reaction search and rescue capabilities in place, have made the issue a contentious one in recent weeks. Washington’s most able Arab ally, the UAE, halted its airstrikes against ISIL for several weeks over concerns about the lack of preparations. The US in response last week said it had moved search and rescue personnel and aircraft to Erbil, in northern Iraq.
The repositioning will cut the response time significantly, especially if a pilot is downed or captured in northern Iraq, though bases in Turkey would put the rescue teams less than an hour away from the area surrounding Raqqa, according to Jim Reese, a retired Delta Force commander who has taken part in rescue missions. So far, Ankara has only allowed reconnaissance flights from its territory.
But even with the faster response time, rescuing a downed pilot or freeing hostages held by ISIL are the most difficult operations for the specialised search and rescue units and US special forces tasked with carrying them out.
How downed pilots are rescued - graphic
“In a non-permissive environment, hostage rescue and combat search and rescue are the hardest operations in the world,” said Mr Reese. “The hardest.”
Iraq is considered “semi-permissive”, according to Mr Reese, without regime air defences and with friendly Iraqi forces and US military personnel in the country. Syria, on the other hand, is “100 per cent non-permissive”, with no friendly Syrian forces on the ground and Damascus’ substantial air defences.
One of the reasons the US likely chose to keep the search and rescue teams in Kuwait, relatively far from the areas where the coalition jets are operating, is because of their large logistical footprint. “They have all the maintenance support there, it’s a very secure location and these assets sit on alert 24/7 with support crews and teams rotating in and out,” said Mr Reese. “To pick up that whole package is a lot of logistics and costs a lot of money.”