Stealth Down

Stealth Down by Ross Simpson. On the evening of March 27, 1999, a Serb surface-to-air missile (SAM) with 1970s technology blew one of the United States’ most advanced fighter jets out of the sky, and shattered the common belief that the Stealth F-117A Nighthawk was invisible. The radar-evading aircraft that crashed near Budjanovci, a village northwest of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, was the first F-117 to be lost in combat. An Air Force special operations helicopter rescue force was scrambled from a forward staging area in Tuzla, Bosnia, to conduct a combat search and rescue (CSAR) mission for the pilot. The helicopters flew into one of the world’s deadliest integrated air defense systems. Their mission: to pick up Lieutenant Colonel Darrell Zelko, who had ejected from his crippled aircraft and landed in a field about ten miles from Batajnica Airfield, Yugoslavia’s primary Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) fighter base. The downed pilot landed within a few miles of three Serb Army brigades. His next duty was to avoid becoming a prisoner of war (POW). Capturing Zelko, an F-117 pilot who had bombed Baghdad during the Gulf War, would have had the effect of throwing cold water on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air campaign at a critical stage, because the propaganda value of parading the "Mother of All POWs" before cameras in Belgrade would have been incalculable.