{"id":90391,"date":"2026-04-06T20:42:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/trump-details-breathtaking-rescue-of-u-s-pilot-in-iran-it-was-pretty-amazing\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T20:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:42:07","slug":"trump-details-breathtaking-rescue-of-u-s-pilot-in-iran-it-was-pretty-amazing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/trump-details-breathtaking-rescue-of-u-s-pilot-in-iran-it-was-pretty-amazing\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Details “Breathtaking” Rescue Of U.S. Pilot In Iran: “It Was Pretty Amazing”"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump gave these details about the successful mission to rescue a downed U.S. pilot in Iran this weekend during a White House briefing Monday afternoon<\/a>: <\/p>\n

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Nobody has the military that we have-not even close. We’re the most powerful military anywhere in the world, by far. The flight crews and warfighters aboard those aircraft took extraordinary risks to rescue their fellow service members. This first wave of search and rescue forces successfully located the pilot of the F-15, and he was extracted from enemy territory by an HH-60 Jolly Green II helicopter-a fabulous machine-as our warriors faced gunfire at very close range. It’s amazing that, when you look at the machinery-what happened-that nobody was even injured. Meanwhile, the second crew member, a weapons system officer, highly respected colonel, had landed a significant distance away from the pilot. When you’re going at those speeds, even if you go out two or three seconds later, it’s miles-it’s miles and miles away, because you’re going fast. He was injured quite badly and stranded in an area teeming with terrorists from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-rough group-as well as besieged militia and local authorities. Many, on top of everything else, they told the communities actually within-inside of Iran-the people of Iran, they were given a tremendous incentive to find this pilot. Despite the peril, the officer followed his training and climbed into the treacherous mountain terrain, and started climbing toward a higher altitude-something they were trained to do in order to evade capture. They want to always go as far away from the site of the shootdown. You want to go as far away, because they all head right to that site. You want to be as far away as you can. And he was injured, and it was an amazing, amazing thing. He scaled cliff faces, bleeding rather profusely, treated his own wounds, and contacted American forces to transmit his location. They have a very sophisticated beeper-type apparatus that is on them at all times. And when they go out on these missions, they make sure they have lots of battery space and they’re in good shape. And this one worked really well-amazingly-saved his life. We immediately mobilized a massive operation to retrieve him from the mountain holdout, and he kept going higher and higher. The mountain kept getting rougher and rougher, and really very, very hard to find. The second rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more. We were bringing them all over, and a lot of it was subterfuge. We wanted to have them think he was in a different location, because they had a vast military force out there. Thousands-thousands of people were looking. So we wanted them to look in different areas. So we were scattered all over like we were right on top of him. We had seven different locations where they thought-and they were very confused. They said, Well, wait a minute, they’ve got groups here, they’ve got groups there. It’s amazing. I was listening to these great people, these great generals-General Raisin Kane, who’s amazing-and Pete Hegseth was amazing, but I listened to the whole thing. It was pretty amazing. So they had all these different sites where everybody thought he was located. We think we have him over there, because they have nine planes circling a little area that’s 25 miles down the coast. So in a breathtaking show of skill and precision, lethality and force, America’s military descended on the area-the real area-engaged the enemy, rescued the stranded officer, destroyed all threats, and exited Iranian territory while taking no casualties of any kind. The heroic F-15 weapons system officer had evaded capture on the ground in Iran for almost 48 hours. That’s a long time when you’re in tough shape and when you’re bleeding. It’s a long time. When we left, as you probably know, we had two large planes-pretty old planes-that carried a lot. We needed a lot more equipment going in than coming out, obviously, because going in we needed to be able to scale mountains, and we had a lot of equipment. But the sand was-it was sandy, wet sand-so we thought there may be a problem taking off because of the weight of the plane. And then we also had all the men jumping back onto the planes, and they got pretty well bogged down. And we had a contingency plan, which was unbelievable, where lighter, faster aircraft came in and they took them out. We blew up the old planes. We blew them up to smithereens, because we had equipment on the planes that, frankly, we’d like to take, but I don’t think it was worthwhile spending another four hours there taking it off. So we didn’t want anybody to have it. We have the best-best equipment anywhere in the world. We didn’t want anybody examining our anti-aircraft and other equipment. So these were large planes that were old-pretty old-and we blew them up. And we had faster, lighter planes come in, and they were able to land on the sand. We needed the bigger planes because we had so much equipment that we needed. We took three helicopters over there, which were very strongly used, and couldn’t have lived without them. They did, and they performed unbelievably.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

RealClearPolitics Videos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump gave these details about the successful mission to rescue a downed U.S. pilot in Iran this weekend during a White House briefing Monday afternoon: PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Nobody has the military that we have-not even close. We’re the most powerful military anywhere in the world, by far. The flight crews and warfighters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1234,13145,6323,261,3661,5811,1655,5395,542],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}