When the Air Force’s F-117 stealth fighter, the supersecret “Black Jet,” was shot down by a Serbian surface-to-air missile on March 27, 1999, a radio call went into the night: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I’m Vega 31, on the way down.”

That call came from the stealth fighter’s pilot, dangling beneath a parachute, scanning bare Serbian farmscape, and talking into a PRC-112A, handheld, line-of-sight survival radio.

It was a war in which Air Force Special Operations Forces played a pivotal role – as downed airmen found out.

No one had ever shot down a stealth fighter before. No F-117 pilot had ever found himself in such a plight. The F-117 pilot, whose name is withheld here, was parachuting into enemy territory with an obsolete radio that might or might not reach friendly forces.

Operation Allied Force, the 1999 battle for Kosovo – like wars before it – brought together the new and the old, the conventional and the unorthodox. It was a war in which Air Force Special Operations Forces played a pivotal role – as downed airmen found out.

While the pilot of the high-tech stealth fighter descended in his chute, Capt. Jim Cardoso shifted from standing on alert to preparing to lead a rescue force of three helicopters. The two larger helicopters were Pave Lows, an MH-53M and a similar MH-53J model. The Pave Low was a Vietnam-era airframe packed full of new equipment for night- and low-level operations, even in bad weather, but it was still very old. The third helicopter, an MH-60G, was smaller and newer, but some crewmembers considered it inadequate. The Air Force had considered buying a version with terrain-following radar but had purchased a no-frills model instead.

“I was well acquainted with my risks and vulnerabilities,” the F-117 pilot said later. “I had flown in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 – 20 combat sorties, about the average for guys who were there for the whole war – so I had combat experience.

“I took off from Aviano Air Base, Italy. I flew the F-117 to the target and dropped two 2,000-lb. laser-guided weapons on a very specific target in the Belgrade area. I came off the target 20 nautical miles northwest of Belgrade when it happened.” Neither the pilot nor the Air Force want to say more about how the Serbs bagged an F-117 except that the culprit was “an enemy missile system.” Two aircraft were shot down during the Kosovo campaign: The other was an F-16 Fighting Falcon, callsign Hammer 34, whose pilot was also rescued.

Cardoso’s Pave Lows would fly cover for the MH-60G Pave Hawk, which would go in and make the pick-up, if possible, of Vega 31.

“I ejected,” said the F-117 pilot. “My first thing to do was to inventory the condition of my parachute and my equipment. It was a 90 percent, almost full moon night. We were receiving a lot of illumination. I looked up at the canopy and thought it was a great, perfect – a fully inflated parachute. And my second thought was, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ because it was an orange and white parachute glowing like a Chinese lantern out there in the middle of the night. Anybody down on the ground was certain to see me and track me visually as I floated downward, surrounded by all that light.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m alone out here. I’m single-ship. There has been no talking, no squawking. If I don’t get things going now, it may take hours before they know I’m out here.’”

The F-117 pilot spoke as calmly as he could into the radio: “I’m out of the aircraft,” he said. There was a procedure to help friendlies know this was the real thing. The F-117 pilot said those words, carefully.

Cardoso’s Pave Lows would fly cover for the MH-60G Pave Hawk, which would go in and make the pick-up, if possible, of Vega 31.

Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC, was the “owner” of the helicopters. The Pave Low community had been operating in that part of the world for years. The Pave Low detachment was a mixture of aircraft and people from the 20th and 21st Special Operations Squadrons. The sole MH-60G belonged to the 55th Special Operations Squadron. All three units were based at Hurlburt Field, Fla., where AFSOC is headquartered.

The Pave Low detachment was a mixture of aircraft and people from the 20th and 21st Special Operations Squadrons.

Others were in the air, too. Most important were A-10 Warthog, or Sandy, aircraft that controlled the rescue scene. There was also a tanker, an airborne control ship, and several other aircraft in the area.

The command arrangements that night were complicated. Lt. Col. Steve Laushine, 55th SOS commander, was aboard Cardoso’s Pave Low as the commander of the rescue helicopter force. Cardoso was the helicopter flight commander, which made him responsible for the actual flying of the three helicopters. Capt. John Cherrey, pilot of the A-10, callsign Sandy 01, was the OSC, or on-scene commander, meaning he would survey the site of the possible rescue and determine what actions to take.

Remembered Cardoso: “As the night progressed, the weather got progressively worse. By the time we were proceeding inbound from the border (Bosnia to Serbia), it dropped to 3,000 feet overcast, solid, and below that it was intermittent rain showers. It was not a big deal for us in the helicopters to be limited to flying below 3,000 feet, but it was difficult for the other aircraft, like the A-10s.”

When the MH-53M, MH-53J, and MH-60G took off to attempt the pick-up, everyone in the rescue force knew the United States had lost an F-117 stealth fighter in combat for the first time. Developed in a supersecret “black program” in the 1980s, and revealed to the public only in 1989 after almost 50 were already flying, the “Black Jet” was the silver bullet of the U.S. war arsenal. Remembered one participant in the rescue attempt: “Allowing the Serbs to have a senior officer, an F-117 pilot, to parade around in front of the world like a trophy would have changed the whole feeling and attitude and complexion for everyone.”

“I wanted to clear my landing site as rapidly as possible. I tried to minimize movement and sound and to not use my flashlight.”

The F-117 was shot down at 8:38 p.m. By 1:00 a.m., Serbian television was showing footage of civilians dancing around the burning, crumpled wreckage of the stealth fighter, with its serial number (82-806) and other markings plainly visible.

Before he hit the ground, the F-117 pilot achieved radio contact with Frank 36, a tanker that was refueling F-16s over Bosnia. Then the pilot came to Earth in a meticulously plowed farm field. “It was very flat and there was no cover,” he said. “I wanted to clear my landing site as rapidly as possible. I tried to minimize movement and sound and to not use my flashlight.

“I realized I was no longer a jet pilot,” he said. His focus now was on preventing nearby Serb troops from capturing him. “Now, I had become a Special Ops, special tactics kind of guy on a covert mission. I made my way to my initial hole-up site, a shallow irrigation ditch. As it ended up, that was where I stayed the whole time.”

Once in his hole-up, the F-117 pilot jumped back up on the radio. It was now 9:58 p.m., or one hour, 20 minutes into the event.

“My squadron life support shop had just purchased a $100 K-Mart special Garman-40 handheld GPS [global positioning system, for navigation]. Before the war started, I grabbed my intelligence officer, looked at a huge map of the AOR [area of responsibility, meaning the combat theater], oriented myself on where the country borders were, and where the SAR dot was. [The SAR dot, for search and rescue, is a point on a map picked at random and briefed to everyone on a combat mission, to be used as a point of reference without need to mention geographic names].

“I had an idea geographically where the SAR dot was. I made a guess and when I checked my GPS – it took a while for that sucker to connect to the satellite – and the SAR dot was in the GPS. It told me I was 39 degrees and 101 miles from the SAR dot. So when I came up, I said that. This made a big difference because the rescue people had a lot of ideas as to where I was.”

As a survivor and an evader, the F-117 flyer knew it was important to have situational awareness. Unfortunately, he could see and hear little from his ditch. The thought crossed his mind that he would love a full-day shopping spree at L.L. Bean, including some sort of night vision device, perhaps a monocular. After the moon set, there was no illumination at all.

At the three-hour point, he first made contact with the Sandys. “We established good radio contact – in the clear. We had no secure voice capability. They authenticated me multiple times. That means we used a technique that enabled me to confirm that I was not an imposter. We knew that the Serbs had very good tactical radio reception and were almost certainly listening.

“The Sandys [Cherrey in his A-10] wanted to know if I’d been captured, if this was an ambush. The helicopters were approaching me now, and they were ready to execute, but they were called off because they feared I’d been captured.

“At the 3-1/2 hour point or so [about 11:30 p.m.], I had a visitor, a dog. It was evident there was quite a bit of search activity very near me. I had a 9 mm pistol with two extra clips but had no intention of using it in any combat role. There was some pretty good rain. I fashioned an awning with one of my waterproof maps and huddled under it. This was very effective.”

Because the Sandys couldn’t drop down below the weather (unlike Cardoso’s helicopters), they had to rely on the downed airman for a great deal of their situational awareness, including whether it was safe to come in. Time passed. There were false starts. The helicopter crews apologized to the downed flyer later for authenticating him again and again, questioning whether it was really him or a Serb trap.

“Maybe I had a gun to my head,” the F-117 pilot said. “Maybe I was under duress. So they asked, ‘Vega 31, is it okay to come in there?’ I thought, ‘Don’t ask me that. I don’t want that to be my decision.’ I did not know what assets were out there. I didn’t know we had helicopters with trained special weapons guys. I did know that enemy troops were within 100 yards of me, but didn’t know how many.”

More time passed. In the Special Operations world, the conventional wisdom is that a rescue won’t succeed if the survivor is on the ground for more than two hours. That point was now far behind.

At one juncture, A-10 pilot Cherrey called, “Vega 31, if you don’t answer we’re going to have to not do this now and come back later.” The downed airman knew that “later” meant becoming a Serb prisoner and being paraded through Belgrade. “I paused and said, ‘Yeah. Let’s go for it.’ I felt that if I learned I was about to be captured, I would have time to make a radio call, starting with authentication and saying, ‘Knock it off. Don’t come in here.’”

The rescue force was now ready to grab the F-117 flyer. Nerves were tight. Cardoso said, “We’d spent the whole night trying to get to this point – the pick-up. Now, we were unable to spot him. It was extremely dark. We were expecting an infrared strobe. We were talking to him. We knew he was close. We made a couple of passes trying to find him, our three helicopters spread out in a loose formation so we could maneuver as necessary, and could not see him. We saw some trucks near him. But we could not see his strobe. We had no way to know it wasn’t working.”

The F-117 pilot, having radioed that his strobe wasn’t working (a message that apparently didn’t get through), considered guiding the rescuers with a pen-gun flare. “I had one of those. God bless our life support people, that device was all wrapped in duct tape, meaning there was no way I could prepare it for use. I thought, ‘It’s going to take me minutes to prep this sucker. Besides, there’s no way I want to shoot this a thousand feet into the air because it’s going to compromise my position to everybody for miles around.’”

It was so dark that when the MH-60G landed, it landed one rotor arc from the F-117 pilot and he could not see it. He finally saw the top part of the helicopter, which began to glow because it was illuminated by dust in the air creating static electricity from the leading edge of the rotors. In the MH-60G’s cockpit, pilot Franks was trying to spot the survivor.

Cardoso’s co-pilot, Capt. John Glass, was now working the radio. In the Pave Low’s first direct contact with the downed airman, Glass suggested using a regular flare.

The F-117 pilot recalled: “I lit that flare for just two seconds and then put it out. They told me later this got their attention immediately. They had been on night vision for hours and a signal like that is going to burn. They were about a mile from me at that point and decided the MH-60G would make a quick grab and go. They were very anxious about the Serbian vehicular activity around me.”

In the Pave Low, Cardoso intended to circle and provide fire support as necessary. The MH-60G “came behind us,” Cardoso said, “and made a very aggressive approach in basically black-hole conditions, working on the goggles. He put the aircraft down and had Vega 31 virtually almost at the rotor tips.”

It was 3:38 a.m., or seven hours after the pilot bailed out, when Capt. Chad Franks eased the MH-60G to the ground. “That was the longest 30 seconds I ever spent on the ground,” Franks said. “When he lit off his flare, we were right on top of him, so we did an autorotation down on top of him. Then, we came into a hover because we’d made a deal with our pararescue jumpers, or PJs, that we would always keep the survivor out at the one o’clock position. By this time, we were sure this was our F-117 pilot, but going on in the back of my mind was the idea that it might have been him, but he might have been in a Serb trap.”

It was so dark that when the MH-60G landed, it landed one rotor arc from the F-117 pilot and he could not see it. He finally saw the top part of the helicopter, which began to glow because it was illuminated by dust in the air creating static electricity from the leading edge of the rotors. In the MH-60G’s cockpit, pilot Franks was trying to spot the survivor.

“He stood up and I saw him alone,” Franks said. “He was on the radio and asked permission to come aboard. My PJs and the combat controller went out and grabbed him and brought him in.”

The pararescuemen, or PJs, ensured that the F-117 pilot wasn’t injured and that he fit the profile, the size, and shape of the man they were looking for. This was no Serb actor pretending to be a U.S. airman. They hefted him in the back of the MH-60G and jumped in after him. Franks took off.

The helicopters hauled the survivor to Tusla. There, he transferred to an MC-130 Combat Talon and continued on to his base at Aviano.

“We pulled off my rescue with a walkie-talkie, a road flare and a $100 GPS, a testimony to the human element,” said the rescued pilot later.

On the C-130 flying to Aviano, relaxing, in a high state of intensity after being rescued, the F-117 flyer had a plastic bag next to him with his gear in it. He started hearing a ticking. That was when his renegade infrared strobe, the one that hadn’t worked when he needed it to save his life, began operating. “I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

This article was first published in The Year in Special Operations: 2005 Edition. At that time, the pilot’s name was withheld for reasons of operational security. He has since been identified as then-Lt. Col. Darrell Zelko.