Did Iran Use Third Khordad Missile System To Shoot Down A US F-15E Strike Eagle? Here’s What You Need To Know About The New Air Defence System Amid Ongoing War

Iran says its new air defence system just shot down more US aircraft, as clashes with American and Israeli forces drag on.

Right after the US confirmed it had rescued the second crew member from a downed F-15E fighter jet, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed they’d also hit another US aircraft involved in the rescue.

Iran’s New Air Defence System in Focus

According to the Fars news agency, the IRGC says they targeted this plane while it searched for the missing officer over Isfahan, in southern Iran.

Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya military command went on state TV and said their new system is now responsible for bringing down

The F-15E costing around 31 million dollars is thought to have crashed in the Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province in southwestern Iran, which is close to the Iraqi border.

Both crew members were thrown out of the plane. One of them was rescued after the incident on Friday and the other one was rescued on Sunday.

An A-10 Thunderbolt II, or the so-called Warthog, was hit in a follow-up rescue mission to retrieve the lost crew-member. The plane crashed subsequently when it entered the airspace of Kuwait, although the pilot managed to escape.

Is Iran overly dependent on passive sensors?

Following the decimation of most of its radar-guided surface-to-air missile systems by US and Israeli precision airstrikes, Iran currently appears to be depending heavily on passive sensors, which measure the heat emitted by the engines and airframe friction of the aircraft in question.

An infrared system identifies an aircraft by detecting the heat radiating through the engines of the jet using a cooled thermal seeker and no radar is involved. 

The system operator aims the launcher until the seeker scans and acquires the strongest heat signature against the cooler sky background. When locked, the moving heat source is followed to steer the missile in the right direction.

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