Rescue Pilot Goes Viral: “A Light No Sensor Could Detect Led Me to the Missing Airman in Iran”
My name is Major Daniel Ericson.
I am 36 years old.
My call sign is Halo and I fly the HH60W Jolly Green 2, the newest combat rescue helicopter in the United States Air Force, assigned to the 56th Rescue Squadron.
I am going to tell a story that happened on April 5, 2026 on a mountain in Iran on a flight that changed everything I thought I knew about the world, about my profession, and about myself.
I don’t know how to name what I saw that night.
I only know that I saw it.
And I know that if I hadn’t seen it, a man would be dead.
I grew up in Duth, Minnesota, on the southern shore of Lake Superior.
Anyone who has never been to Duth in winter doesn’t know what real cold is.
Not the beautiful cold of the mountains, not the dry cold of the desert at night.
The cold in Duth is damp and heavy coming from the lake, getting through your jacket, through your bones, settling in.
My father, Eric Ericson, was a Lutheran pastor in a small red brick church on Hermantown Road about four miles from downtown.
Small church, small congregation, but my father preached as if he were speaking to a thousand people.
My mother, Sarah, taught Sunday school, and also managed the congregation’s food bank on Friday afternoons.
I was raised inside that world the way a military brat grows up in the army.
Completely immersed without questioning.
Faith functioning like breathing.
Something you do because it has always been done because that’s how things are.
The change was gradual with no drama at all.
There wasn’t a day when I woke up and decided I no longer believed.
It happened slowly between the end of high school and the first years at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
The prayers became mechanical.
The words of the verses lost the weight they had in childhood.
Around the age of 22, when I graduated from the academy in 2014 and entered helicopter flight training, God was something my parents believed in and that I respected for their sake.
I went to the base chapel on Christmas because it reminded me of home, of the fireplace, of the smell of pine, not because I expected to find anyone there.
It was an empty habit wearing the clothes of a tradition.
And I was fine with that.
It never bothered me.
It just wasn’t part of me anymore.
I chose combat rescue.
In the Air Force vocabulary, combat search and rescue, Cesar, is considered one of the most dangerous and most demanding specializations that exist.
The motto is simple, three words, that others may live.
You fly into the worst imaginable situations, behind enemy lines, under fire, at night, in bad weather, with sensors saturated with information and the radio screaming at the same time.
All of this to bring one person back, one life.
That is the entire mission.
You risk everything you have for one.
When I first heard this motto in an introductory CESAR doctrine class at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, I felt something move inside me that I couldn’t name at that moment.
A pastor’s son hearing the words that others may live and feeling them resonate in a place deeper than any sense of military duty.
I ignored it.
I buried it under training, flight hours, technical manuals, protocol, but it was there, quiet, waiting.
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The war with Iran began on February 28th, 2026.
My squadron was deployed to Aluded air base in Qatar in less than 72 hours.
I already knew Aluded from previous rotations.
A huge modern base with almost 10,000 American military personnel.
A temperature that in summer exceeds 50 degrees C, but even in March is already punishing in the morning.
We were housed in the alert barracks near the flight line, sleeping with our flight kit hanging at the head of the bed, ready to get up in minutes.
The mission was clear.
If any American aircraft went down, we were there to pick up whoever survived.
For 5 weeks, no one went down.
The Pentagon said that American air supremacy was total, that Iranian defenses had been destroyed in the first 48 hours of the conflict, that our pilots were untouchable.
We flew alert missions every day.
We took off, conducted training patrols within the airspace of Qatar and the Emirates, and returned.
The tension of being so close to a real conflict, but not entering it, is a specific kind of fatigue.
You are ready all the time.
The body learns to sleep half awake, one eye on the ceiling and one ear on the radio.
Five weeks like that.
And then came April 3rd.
It was approximately 2:40 in the morning, Doha time, when the alarm sounded in the barracks.
Not the exercise alarm, the real alarm.
I got out of bed with my heart already in my throat before I knew what had happened.
The briefing lasted less than 8 minutes.
An F-15E Strike Eagle call sign Dude 44 had been hit by a manportable missile over southwestern Iran in the Zagros Mountains region near the province of Isvahan.
Both crew members had ejected.
Beacons active.
We needed to go now.
We went.
My helicopter call sign Jolly 21 was part of the first response wave.
Flying alongside us were A-10 warthogs on the Sandy mission, which is the term we use for the attack planes that create a protective bubble around a survivor in enemy territory, suppressing any adversary force that tries to approach.
The A-10 pilots were already in communication with Dude 44 Alpha, the F-15 pilot, who had landed in a relatively more accessible area in a valley between two foothills.
His signal was strong.
The position was bad, but workable.
The rescue of Alpha was violent from beginning to end.
When we entered the approach envelope, my helicopter was engaged by practically every Iranian with a weapon in range.
Rifle fire from multiple angles.
My crew chief, Sergeant Kowalsski, reported projectiles hitting the fuselage.
We took at least seven confirmed hits later in maintenance.
The A-10s were firing their 30mm cannons so close to us to suppress enemy positions that I could feel the vibration of the bursts passing through the structure of my helicopter.
It’s a strange sensation, that one.
You know they are on your side and yet the body reacts as if it were a threat because the noise and the percussion in the air are the same as a weapon being fired in your direction.
We got Alpha out of there alive.
Injured with a deep cut on his face and a dislocated shoulder from the ejection but alive.
He climbed up the helicopter’s cargo ramp with Kowalsski’s help while I maintained a hover in the middle of that chaos.
And as soon as he was inside, I banked hard to the left and we left the kill zone.
Behind us, the support Blackhawk took more serious hits.
Another helicopter in the formation was damaged.
One of the A-10s covering our exit was hit by enemy fire.
The pilot continued to fly the damaged aircraft out of Iranian airspace and ejected over Kuwait when the plane could no longer hold uP. He survived.
But in the helicopter, as we flew back to Qatar with Alpha semi-conscious in the cargo bay, the only thing I could think about was Bravo, the other crew member, the weapon systems officer, a colonel.