A fighter pilot shares his view from the cockpit

Photos: Israeli military air force, IDF spokesman, U.S. Air Force courtesy

For F-16 combat navigator Lieutenant T., the longest and most tense part of the mission is the silence — hours of flying thousands of kilometers across hostile airspace toward Iran, every sense locked in. Then everything happens at once: the strike, the blasts, the rising smoke, and the urgent turn for home, with one goal above all — that every crew member makes it back safely

The situation room was spartan except for the glow of digital maps. Screens flickered along the wall, their grids casting a cold light across the room. Across them ran thin flight lines, stretching eastward from Israel across the Middle East.

They pointed toward a destination that until last year belonged more to the realm of training scenarios than operational schedules: Iran.

In that room at Hatzerim Air Base, near Be’er Sheva — far from the cameras and official statements — sat Lieutenant T., 23, a combat navigator in the Israeli Air Force’s 107th Squadron, known as the “Knights of the Orange Tail.”

For long hours he helped plot what would become the opening blow of the largest strike formation in the history of the IAF. The work stretched over weeks of preparation.

“For quite a long period I planned Phase One, the Bereishit strike,” he says. “From there I rolled it out to the ground crews, to all the teams, and immediately afterward I went up to fly myself — literally the very next day.”

In unemotional military-speak, that sentence captures the reality of Israel’s new war with Iran which is largely an air war: plan, brief, launch, fly. One day, Lt. T. was tracing routes and calculating the choreography of a mass attack. The next, he was strapped into the rear seat of a two-man F-16I Sufa, heading east with the very formation he had helped build.

On the Tuesday before the operation began, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir arrived at Hatzerim to address the crews. He moved between briefing rooms and planning centers, meeting commanders and aircrews preparing for a mission months in the making.

“When you are ordered to act and the command is given,” he told them, “I have faith in you that these aircraft will take to the skies, strike their targets, and carry out their missions with distinction.”

A few days later, on Shabbos Parshas Tetzaveh, the order would come — nearly 200 fighter aircraft would take off.

Lt. T. had completed the pilot course only a little over a year earlier, in the middle of a war. Did he ever imagine he would find himself taking part in a mission of this scale?

“Honestly, no,” he says. “I didn’t think I would have the privilege to do something this significant.”