A video shared by Tehran Times claims to show the moment a US F-35 fighter jet was hit during a combat mission over Iranian airspace. The clip shows the aircraft appearing to take damage, with explosions, smoke trails, and the jet veering off course mid-air.
A US F-35 fighter jet was attacked during an Iranian strike and forced to make an emergency landing at a military base in the Middle East, according to CNN. The claim, first made by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), would mark the first known instance of Iran hitting one of the US military’s most advanced and expensive aircraft in the ongoing conflict in Middle East.
According to the IRGC, the stealth jet was struck by air defence systems over central Iran in the early hours of Thursday. A video shared by Tehran Times claims to show the moment a US F-35 fighter jet was hit during a combat mission over Iranian airspace. The clip shows the aircraft appearing to take damage, with explosions, smoke trails, and the jet veering off course midair.
In a statement, the IRGC said it had “struck and seriously damaged” the aircraft at around 2.50 am (local time), adding that the jet’s fate remains unclear and that there is a “high possibility” it may have crashed. The group also said the operation followed the interception of more than 125 US-Israeli drones, calling it evidence of improvements in Iran’s air defence systems.
If confirmed, the incident would mark the first time Iran has successfully targeted an F-35, a fifth-generation fighter jet that costs more than $100 million and is considered a cornerstone of US air power. Both the US and Israel have been deploying F-35s extensively since the conflict escalated on February 28.
US CONFIRMS EMERGENCY LANDING, PLAYS DOWN DAMAGE
According to CNN, US Central Command said the aircraft was “flying a combat mission over Iran” when it was forced to make an emergency landing. “The aircraft landed safely, and the pilot is in stable condition,” spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins told CNN. “This incident is under investigation.”
However, Washington has not issued any official statement. The Pentagon said its operations are going as planned, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth saying the US is “winning decisively” and that Iran’s air defences have been “flattened”.
Amid escalating conflict, at least 16 US aircraft have reportedly been destroyed since the start of the war, including 10 Reaper drones, while several others have been damaged in combat or accidents.
[ADDENDUM]
The actual video of the event, plus more, from The Hindustan Times:
Remember when the Yugoslavian army shot down a couple of F117 stealth bombers using some crappy old russian gear and the Americans had to stop jerking each other off about their invisible killing machine and take their toys home? It’s like that.
That’s it then. Canada, buy those Gripens and avoid the F35s.
I don’t know much about the Gripen but I don’t think buying anything that’s relies on the US is a good choice.
Gripen can also sneak up on, out-manoveur and take down F35s btw.
Can, but usually won’t. They are a ”generation” apart, which in fighter aircraft language means something like ”about 15-20% better overall”.
And this is in no way to endorse the 35 nor diss Gripen, but a fact that the air forces of many countries have established in their trial programs. Just hoping the Swedes get yet another modernized iteration out at some point to close the gap.
Still safer than Boeing.
Good for the pilot he made it back to base but that F35 is as good as lost more than likely with the costs of repair these things have
That’s actually a very good point.
If the things cost roughly $100 million each… yeah that’s not gonna be a cheap or easy repair, may actually just make more sense to part it out.
The current Hegseth administration has also removed the requirements for Right to Repair from DOD contracts, so Lockheed can charge as many millions as they want on repairs
I just know we’re all just waiting for their toddler in chief to publicly call the pilots losers and suckers. “I like pilots who don’t get shot down.”
Welp.
That was much faster than even I was expecting.
Iran said they were holding back due to ramadan cuz its a holy month and they shouldn’t be doing war in holy months.
Eid Mubarak, America.
I’m not glad for this war, but given that it is happening, I gotta admit that I am glad to see US hubris challenged so thoroughly
God damn russia hit the jackpot getting this pedophile in office
All of American’s adversaries are going to want to exchange notes with Iran on how they managed that.
Looks like it was done via thermals, stealth aircraft is for radar to my knowledge, and maybe not the most effective against thermal targeting. I could be wrong though
Stealth just means low observable, there are ways to reduce the IR signature of jet engines, at the expense of either thrust or even more complex and expensive systems, such as what the F-22/F-23 use.
Pretty much, thermals require being much closer and are only good from certain directions, so the stealth is entirely focused against radar missiles that can be shot from far out of sight and don’t need to be behind the enemy
Doubt it, that was just some swamp gas reflecting Venus’s light off noctilucent clouds.
A video shared by Tehran Times claims to show the moment a US F-35 fighter jet was hit during a combat mission over Iranian airspace. The clip shows the aircraft appearing to take damage, with explosions, smoke trails, and the jet veering off course midair.
Where’s the video showing this.
A plane that cost $1trillion dollars to develop was almost taken out by normal munitions. If this can be done again Americans air superiority is cooked.
But the purpose of these planes is to please shareholders.
Duck US imperialism, but its stealth not bulletproof, 1 getting shot doesn’t really show anything.
Two now.
Yeah but it has 3 more cupholders than Chinese fighter jets and Apple Carplay.
If this can be done again Americans air superiority is cooked.
Wouldn’t that depend on how successful US is at shooting down Chinese planes and how many planes each one has? If China can damage one F-35 in, let’s say, 5% of the missions US is sending but US can shoot down 90% of Chinese fighters it sees and they have similar numbers of planes, wouldn’t US still have air superiority?
Considering the Chinese have all of our F-35 development blueprints and all our other development blueprints, yeah shit is fucked. Opsec for DoD contractors has been trash for at least twenty years and before that it was easy enough to simply bribe someone because healthcare costs compromise almost every us citizen.
Sure and if I made 90% of my basketball shots and Lebron James missed 90% of them I’d beat him in basketball.
I mean yeah, theoretically, but that ain’t happening. China is a peer competitor with the same level of technology as the US, while Iran is a scrappy underdog. China also massively outproduces the US.
Let’s hope we will never find out if that’s true.
Or if we do, it’s a limited engagement that doesn’t end with nukes flying. Iran winning this war will make future wars less likely, so I’m hoping for that as well.
Do you remember last year when Pakistan shot down 3 rafaels? It was chinese aircrafts operating chinese missiles. Only the pilots were Pakistani.
Yeah, my numbers are just examples. What I’m saying is that one hit doesn’t end air superiority. You need to know how effective both sides are at eliminating targets.
Right, that’s why they said if it happens again, and yes because if you lose 10% of your planes each day you have to stop sending the planes unless you want to get them all blown up in ten days.
ding ding ding
Winner! Winner!
Oh man, Taiwan is so fucked.
Sadly yes, along with South Korea and Japan.
And kablamo, now we have Orwell’s EastAsia.
God fucking damnit.
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Lol
However, Washington has not issued any official statement. The Pentagon said its operations are going as planned, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth saying the US is “winning decisively” and that Iran’s air defences have been “flattened”.
I see we’re going full Baghdad Bob here.
They’re gonna be awkwardly standing behind their Great Leader as he insults and derides the pilots, possibly by name, on international media, for getting hit.
The US would never admit an F35 was hit. There would have be to be substantial evidence for them to even consider it.
The real answer will come on Monday when the market opens.
Trump just confirmed that for the first time in history, birds are real. And one of them managed to hit a $100mil jet.
Reminds me of a poker player losing on the river and yelling “you were drawing dead”!
Guess not, buddy.
Yep.
“Time is flat circle”
angrily inhales cigarette
Can f35 customers ask for a refund?
I mean, you can try, but if you’re not paying for the subscription to ongoing software updates, uh, YOLO, basically.
Not the UK. They were smart enough to demand source code.
Not accurate
Well we wrote a lot of it…
Eh, if you fly it within range of a heat seeker you get what you deserve. Looks like a skill issue tbh.
I doubt it was the pilot’s error more than the commander giving them a bad mission.
I would be so incredibly mad as the AA battery cmdr if I witnessed a direct hit and the jet just continued to fly lol.
I can literally see the War Thunder “hit” message
Fucking hitboxes are janky AF in this latest update!!
No, no you would not be.
Because now you have some of the most valuable targetting data on Earth.
Iran, Russia and China will be pouring over all of that data, using it to figure out how to replicate a successful tracking and interception with their existing systems, or new ones.
If you were a real War Thunder player, you’d be leaking that information on the forums.
… do people not get this?
That… this is the start of F35s just… not really being stealth, in at least certain situations?
Where the… US and other F35 operators… may not know what those ‘certain situations’ are?
6 months, a year, 2 years from now, the US no longer can just assume it will get air superiority.
That… kinda … blows up a good deal of our military doctrine.
Do you notice how the F35 … isn’t even doing evasive manuevers?
Is not deploying countermeasures?
It didn’t know it was being targetted.
That’s a really big problem.
Buddy chill its not that deep. He flew too low and in the range of an IR missile battery that they failed to spot as part of their SIGINT. That’s why they have video, he was so close that radar stealth literally would not matter. It even explains the small missile warhead size.
And DAS missile detectors have been pretty awful at being able to detect missiles due to their tiny package size. There’s no gg ez RWR for passive tracking missiles.
They’re flying sorties more brashly because they thought AA was taken care of, which is how this ambush succeeded.
Yes it’s defnitley a first for successfully hitting the F-35, but this isn’t some groundbreaking concept. It would have been huge news if they targeted the F-35 at a BVR range with active tracking like with a radar or data link solution.
Like I said, I’m sure the soldiers were super excited that they got a hit, but they would defnitley have preferred to have scored a full kill with a pilot ejection and subsequent capture.
they would defnitley have preferred to have scored a full kill with a pilot ejection and subsequent capture.
Iran is not stupid, they know how much an F35 costs and how to drain the US.
What the heck is this informed speculation? There is only room for mindless speculation here on lemmy. You need to be as ill-informed as possible to be able to comment on these things.
Still a better experience than reddit lol
… You can make a larger missile, with a larger warhead, that is IR guided.
We have no idea what altitude that F35 was flying at, we don’t know where the IR camera that took that video was mounted at.
The missile comes in from an angle totally different to the camera’s POV… you sure there was no datalink involved in that?
You can put more, cheaper than BVR radar, IR sensors in more places, maybe even make a drone swarm of them, network them together, fly them around in orbital patrol patterns, have a corresponding network of ground based IR missile launchers.
Aerial version of Defense in Depth.
So if your threat environment looks like that, what, do you just blast out active jamming, to try and degrade/disable/overwhelm the datalinks between the IR sensor network?
Now you’re an EM homing beacon, now something akin to SEAD works against you.
You could even put IR sensors on ground tethered balloons, with a physical data link, around areas / things you know you can’t hide.
Lol, the modern warfare hot indicator. Listen, you can hear it.
x
See?
x
Looked like “mechanical failure” to me…
These turds sat on a runway for over a year with software issues.
it will buff off, really
Ok… I watched less than one minute of that video. And previewed ahead a little bit. All I can see is stock and/or AI generated imagery and video and inserted headlines, and loads of Russian and Chinese astroturf/bots in the comments. I mean, its Hindustan time that’s what I’d expect.
If the F35 got hit by AA and landed, it speaks well of the aircraft; let’s be clear about that. I’m gonna presume that its a resource that the US and Israel have been overusing since the start. Which means Iran has had a lot of opportunity to shoot at them. All stealth means is that their head-on radar cross-section is extremely small, and the coating and shape of the craft refract radar signal, rather than reflect. I’m surprised more haven’t been hit or lost. Hell I’m surprised a Shahed drone swarm hasn’t tried for a carrier. It seems Iran is using what they have to disrupt and upset the world’s energy economy, which is probably the smarter option, for them.
All this “war” proves out to me is that we are that much further into our third world war. And it seems like that is exactly what the vile excrement in power right now seem to want. It’s a great distraction from the fact that we are fucked.
Edit: I always like to leave little notes when I leave a comment I put a little effort into, and am subsequently reminded that I am wrong for having any faith in the human race in general.
I’m gonna presume that its a resource that the US and Israel have been overusing since the start.
Oh?
Why would you presume that?
All stealth means is that their head-on radar cross-section is extremely small, and the coating and shape of the craft refract radar signal, rather than reflect.
You ever heard of the concept of an ambush?
You… appear weaker than you are, absent, and then you set a trap?
Also: $2 trillion dollars.
Could have bought a lot of healthcare with that.
I’m surprised more haven’t been hit or lost.
Not surprising if we haven’t been using them that much and have instead been using a lot of ballistic missiles, untill we basically ran out of them.
You know like how Ukraine went early on, everybody blew their load early, then had to figure out ways to try and get the same range out of stuff launched from fighters/attack aircraft, like the guided+boosted glide bombs?
Hell I’m surprised a Shahed drone swarm hasn’t tried for a carrier.
That’s not surprising given how incredibly rational Iran has been acting.
It doesn’t escalate first.
We do. Then they respond in kind.
Sinking a US carrier and causing roughly a 9/11’s worth of deaths would uh… be quite an escalation, and they’re aware of that.
Fortunately, it seems the sailors on the Ford seemed to do a good enough job of stuffing tshirts into the toilets and setting the laundry room on fire, that that particular carrier uh, removed itself from action, functionally.
It seems Iran is using what they have to disrupt and upset the world’s energy economy, which is probably the smarter option, for them.
It is so insanely obviously the smarter strategy that for decades, that’s been the conclusion of Western military analysts, and Iran has just also … more or less just said that is what they would do.
Not a clue about the nature of your hostility, so I’ll just leave you with it. I was mostly reactive regarding the poor quality of a side’s propaganda, and musing on it. I feel like I’d be wasting my time responding to surreptitious bullet points.
Edit: I’m not sure how other aren’t seeing how you have turned things we agree upon into point of perceived attack, but you’re good. I admit, you like hitting the enter key twice a alot. My original point that your source video for this is obvious garbage still stands. Of course, I am not disputing events as reported. You should try paragraphs.
The dude is spreading dubiously sourced videos across all of the major political communities on Lemmy and declaring the death of America.
I’d say the nature of their hostility is the fact that they are upset that their comrades are concrete reinforced jelly and the only weapons available to them is fake videos made in DCS and a brigade of alt accounts.
Are you implying that the laundry room fire was set on purpose by some of the sailors?
Genuine question. It seems plausible and I’m not sure why I took the official story at face value but I haven’t seen anything to contradict it myself.
Are you implying that the laundry room fire was set on purpose by some of the sailors?
Yes.
Its being investigated.
They already found the tshirts stuffed into the extremely fancy, vaccuum pump system that comprises the toilets.
Yeah I can see you accidentally dropping your phone in the shitter.
Not multiple tshirts.
… It’s kinda like they fragged the aircraft carrier itself, but in a way that didn’t kill anybody.
Clever.
The Dems did go through that whole episode of ‘You do not have to follow illegal orders.’
Declaring ‘No quarter’, publically, in a televised press conference… that’s not allowed by the DoD’s own rules, and is widely regarded as a war crime, in and of itself.
Thank you. I struggle to balance hope and appropriate skepticism.
If the F35 got hit by AA and landed, it speaks well of the aircraft
Does it? If I was rolling out the first tank against an enemy on horseback that were able to disable my tank enough to send my tank back for repair, I’d really have to rethink my tank design.
Not a perfect analogy. But, I’m trying to make a point so it’s exaggerated. We are talking about the flagship stealth aircraft getting shot at and damaged without its knowledge of being targeted or shot at. That’s insane.
Unless Iran is rocking some Chinese tech we don’t know they have (or even some tech they developed themselves) the F35 was tracked and damaged without any knowledge to the pilot at all that they were being shot at until they got hit.
That may speak well of its impact capability. But, the F35 is not a tank, it’s literal purpose is to target the enemy without being detected and Iran just flipped that on its head with the US militaries flagship 2 trillion dollars of development cost aircraft.
That DOES NOT speak well for it at all given it’s fundamental purpose. The fact that it was forced to land and could not carry out it’s purpose is NOT a testament to its ability at all.
It’s not new tech, Planes only know when radar locks happen because the radar ping changes to be faster and more targetted, you can’t detect a heat seeker locking onto a motor. It’s much shorter range and easier to fool if you’re planning on it than radar, since it won’t see the heat over the horisen at the distance radar guided missiles get launched at, but as long as the plane has jet engines it can’t hide from heat seeking missiles well
Sorry about the downvote. I get your point, but I would counter that Iran is levels below us in technology. They should not be able to hit our planes absent some technological advances on their part, big ones. I suspect bad, arrogant orders put those planes in a reckless position.
But the F-35 was a shit show from the start. They demanded it be both a fighter and bomber and do everything, and it went over budget, over time, for what, two decades? I suspect it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, and bad reckless orders. Also they have kill switches in the ones they sell some countries. A fusible link that bricks it. As per the rumour.
Remember when the F35 couldn’t even lift off the ground? Those were some fun articles.
They should not be able to hit our planes absent some technological advances on their part, big ones.
I’m not sure where you got this idea.
Stealth aircraft are not invisible or invulnerable. They have a low radar cross section, that’s it. If they are close to the radar they can be seen, if a missile is using active guidance then it’s close enough to see them.
If they shoot enough missiles and sacrifice enough radar emitters they will eventually get a hit.
The video, which is dubiously sourced and the UI looks more like a video game, shows an aircraft under after burner and then a missile explodes. The video cuts off before you can see any damage, given that the explosion appears larger than the aircraft it is more likely that the missile exploded below the aircraft and closer to the camera.
The stories that people are linking to corroborate the video are of a jet which took damage and landed. That is not a ‘direct hit’, at best they had a near miss and ate some shrapnel.
The video source is untrustworthy, the public reporting in other sources indicate at worst a near-miss, the video is cut before you can see any damage and the OP is spreading it around like propaganda while declaring the end of America.
This story has all of the hallmarks of a misinformation campaign being signal boosted by IRGC & allies. A lot of the commenters here read like low parameter LLMs (thought it is possible that they’re just idiots) trying to drive a false consensus that a F-35 being hit with shrapnel is the end of American air power.
Anyone who believes this dubiously sourced garbage is just naive.
It’s possible for the equipment that Iran has to hit an F-35 in optimal conditions and it is likely that they will eventually get lucky and score a hit. But this video does not show a ‘direct hit’.
They do have some interesting advances. E.g. loitering air defense missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/358_missile
Since F-35 does not use its radar while being stealthy, it would require an early warning from an AWACS about a loitering missile. But the missile is small. It gets pointed to an area and told (typical scenario) “there be helicopters somewhere there, go and see if you can find them”. It cruises in economy mode and watches with presumbaly side-scanning sensors. If it sees a hot topic, it turns and goes from loitering mode to darting mode.
P.S. Not sure if this was the weapon involved. It’s just the strangest thing Iran has.
