TEHRAN – The U.S. F-15 fighter pilots, weapons officers, and ground crew have shared vivid details of their experiences during Operation True Promise, a large-scale Iranian retaliatory attack involving over 300 drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles against Israel on April 13.

As CNN reported in an article published on Friday, the unprecedented scale of the operation left U.S. pilots and military personnel overwhelmed, marking one of the most significant tests of American air power in recent history.   

As Iranian drones and missiles filled the skies, U.S. F-15 pilots scrambled to respond. Fighter jets like the F-15E Strike Eagle, typically equipped with only eight air-to-air missiles, quickly ran out of ammunition during the relentless onslaught.  

“We ran out of missiles pretty quickly…maybe 20 minutes,” admitted Lt. Col. Curtis “Voodoo” Culver, one of the pilots who took part in the mission.  

With their primary weapons exhausted, pilots resorted to high-risk maneuvers, including using their jet’s onboard gun at dangerously low altitudes in near-total darkness to target drones. Maj. Benjamin “Irish” Coffey, another pilot involved in the operation, described the terrifying moments: “You feel the terrain rush, getting closer and closer to the ground. The risk was just too high to try again.”  

Lt. Col. Timothy “Diesel” Causey acknowledged the military’s lack of preparation for such an event, admitting, “We hadn’t started practicing on a large scale for this kind of attack.”  

The drones, designed to evade radar detection, challenged even the most sophisticated systems aboard U.S. fighter jets. Pilots struggled to “find, fix, track, and target” the slow-moving aerial threats, highlighting a gap in current U.S. defensive capabilities.  

Moreover, the situation on the ground at a U.S. military base in West Asia was equally chaotic. As Iranian missiles and drones targeted the base, personnel worked under constant threat, refueling and rearming jets amid explosions and falling debris.  

Iran’s use of high-impact drones challenged the conventional reliance on expensive, high-tech fighter jets and advanced missile systems. 

True Promise Operation inflicted damage on Israeli military bases across the occupied lands. The operation came after the Israeli attack on April 1 against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, located next to the embassy building in Damascus’s Mezzeh district.

The Israeli airstrike killed two senior Iranian military personnel who were on an advisory mission to Syria as well as five of their accompanying officers.