American fighter pilots explain how they fought an overwhelming Iranian drone swarm in total darkness

When F-15 fighter pilot Maj. Benjamin "Irish" Coffey launched his jet one night last spring, he wasn't expecting to run out of missiles fighting off a massive Iranian attack against Israel.

It was April 13, and Iran had fired over 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, a far larger strike than the US military had anticipated. Instructed to use every weapon at their disposal to help defeat the attack, Coffey and his crew mate, weapons systems officer Capt. Lacie "Sonic" Hester, came up with a plan.

Speaking to CNN in their first interviews since that night, Hester and Coffey described flying as close as they could to an Iranian drone, well below the minimum safe altitude for the F-15 Strike Eagle, and using a gun — an extremely dangerous maneuver in total darkness, against a barely visible target. They missed.

"You feel the terrain rush, you feel yourself getting closer and closer to the ground," Coffey told CNN. "The risk was just too high to try again."

Ultimately, US forces in the air and at sea, including Hester and Coffey, intercepted 70 drones and three ballistic missiles that night. The attack was largely thwarted.

But F-15 fighter pilots, weapons officers, and ground crew who took part in the operation and spoke to CNN described feeling overwhelmed at times as they combated the Iranian onslaught, which was the US Air Force's first real test against a prolonged and large-scale drone attack. The fighters spent hours in the air that night.

The situation back at an undisclosed US military base in the Middle East was similarly chaotic, as the base's air defenses shot down Iranian missiles and drones overhead and troops were rushed to bunkers.

Air Force personnel, like the rest of the world, had been waiting and bracing for the expected Iranian strike, a retaliation for Israel's attack on an Iranian consulate building in Syria that killed several members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

"When we were getting our brief to go fly that night, we still had no idea," Hester told CNN. "It could have just been a bust — just another sortie of flying in a circle, waiting for it to happen."

The fighter pilots had not had much time before then to practice, said F-15 pilot Lt. Col. Timothy "Diesel" Causey.

Attack drones "are a low cost, low risk for the enemy to employ. They can send out massive amounts of them and we have to engage them to protect civilians and to protect our allies," Causey told CNN. "We hadn't started practicing on a large scale yet."

The attack drove home how the military will have to grapple with a new generation of warfare that pits multimillion dollar fighter jets against cheap, slow-moving attack drones that can easily evade highly sophisticated radar systems.

"You're talking about something that is on the very edge of a fighter aircraft's ability to detect — what we call 'find, fix, track, target and engage,'" Coffey said. "The best radar in the inventory is in this airplane behind us, and no one really knew whether or not its capability to find these [drones] even existed."

Another challenge: The fighter jets' most effective weapons against the drones were depleted quickly. The F-15E Strike Eagle can carry only eight air-to-air missiles at a time.

"That night, the mission was to shoot down drones with whatever weapons we had available to protect our ally," said F-15 pilot Lt. Col. Curtis "Voodoo" Culver. "We ran out of missiles pretty quickly...20 minutes maybe."

Once those were spent, the next task was even more daunting: landing at the US military base, as Iranian missiles and drones intercepted by the base's Patriot air defense systems exploded overhead and rained debris down on the runways.

Some of the fighter jets, including Coffey and Hester's, had to land with a "hung missile" — an emergency situation in which a missile is fired, but malfunctions and doesn't actually launch.

"This missile — we don't know if it's armed, and we don't know if it's going to explode on our wing," Coffey said. "We don't know if it's going to explode while maintenance is safing the aircraft. It's a big deal. And now, as we start into the landing process, we enter alarm red."

The base had essentially entered a lockdown, signaling an imminent attack.

"Missiles and drones are flying over base, and they're being intercepted over base, so the alarm red goes off," Causey said. "Then at that point is really when you see a lot of military discipline and a lot of bravery under fire."

As pilots tried to land at the base, they saw explosions in the air and called F-15 pilot Maj. Clayton "Rifle" Wicks, who was managing the jets' operations on the ground at the time.

"Really all we could tell them was stay airborne as long as you can, with the gas that you have," Wicks told CNN. "Don't divert, because even our divert airfields – we don't know what's going on there either, so if stuff is blowing up over our heads, very likely stuff is blowing up there too."

Troops on the ground were advised to head to bunkers, but many did not, remaining focused on getting the jets back into the air to continue the fight.

"There was an airman at one point standing next to a fuel truck with tons and tons of fuel in it, just pumping gas into the jet, with stuff exploding over the base," Culver said. "I mean the courage of that airman, that American, to stand up and do that for an ally, is incredible."

Many of the F-15 pilots, air and ground crews who took part in the operation that night received awards this week for bravery. Hester and Coffey were awarded the Silver Star, the military's third highest honor for valor in combat. Wicks received the Bronze Star, which recognizes acts of heroism performed in ground combat. And Causey and Culver received the Distinguished Flying Cross with valor, the military's highest award for extraordinary aerial achievement.

For Culver, the night was emblematic of just how much things have changed for fighter pilots.

"In Vietnam, Robin Olds was shooting down MiG-15s over the Red River," he said, referring to the celebrated fighter pilot who took down 17 enemy aircraft in the Vietnam War.

"That's man on man, person on person, one is trying to kill the other," he continued. "And that is the difference. We went into this understanding that each one of those drones was not trying to kill us in the jet, but potentially, civilian loss of life was on the line. We were engaged in the moment trying to save innocent lives from that air threat. And that is the new nature of this fight."