All was calm above the clouds over the Arabian Sea, and Sam Rutherford’s small propeller plane was cruising at about 120 miles per hour. One Direction was playing on the cockpit speaker.
Until an American voice came over the radio.
“You are approaching a coalition warship in international waters. Request you establish communication, identify yourself.”
Flying south of Iran, Rutherford and co-pilot Shannon Wong had attracted the attention of the US military, which was newly at war in the Middle East.
“So we just got buzzed by an F-16,” says a surprisingly calm Rutherford in video capturing the moment posted on Instagram. (As he later made clear in his post, it was actually an F/A-18 Hornet.)
A day earlier, when the US and Israel launched their war with Iran, Rutherford – a former helicopter pilot in the British military – had been in a similar position, flying over the United Arab Emirates.
Back then, on the Piper PA-28’s radio, he could hear the calls of nearby airliners looking for places to land quickly, as the Persian Gulf became an active war zone.
Many diverted to his destination, the Omani capital Muscat, a usually quiet airport, he told CNN.
After landing, he found himself with a decision to make: wait in Muscat to see how the new war played out; or continue the work he was getting paid to do, delivering this tiny plane he picked up at the factory in Vero Beach, Florida, to its buyer, a flight school in India.
Early the next morning, Omani airspace was open and the route across the Indian Ocean to his destination, Ahmedabad, still viable, he said.
Reading the winds of war, he decided to “get the hell out of Dodge” and start his 900-mile (1,450-kilometer) trip to India.
About three hours after they left, Iran would strike Oman, closing its airspace. But Rutherford’s decision to leave is what led to his encounter with the US fighter jets, whose pilots were still waiting for his reply.
Now he was worrying the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. With a crew of 5,000, it can carry 75 aircraft, including that F/A-18 flying nearby.
And there was a bit of a problem.
“They couldn’t hear us,” Rutherford said. As they tried to establish radio comms with the fighter jet, no reply came.
That made for a nervous few minutes. After all, this Piper wasn’t what one normally sees on this flight route – low-moving and flying at 10,000 feet, while airliners on the route are somewhere well above 30,000.
But Rutherford said as soon as comms were established, things calmed for a second.
Because then the US flier had another request: alter your course either north or south by 15 degrees.
“It was blindingly obvious that we were flying straight towards the aircraft carrier,” Rutherford said. “He had no preference left or right, but please take one of them.”
Neither choice was ideal. South was the open Indian Ocean. North was Iran or Pakistan, and he had clearance for neither country.
What ensued was a like “haggling over a carpet in Marrakech,” he recalled. The Navy jet pilot gave a little. Rutherford calmly explained his limitations.
If he acceded to the jet pilot’s demands and headed south, “then I’d run out of fuel somewhere over the Indian Ocean in my little single-engine aeroplane,” he said.
“So we needed to find a position, a profile that’s kept everybody just sort of in their comfort zone.”
Meanwhile, there were now two F/A-18s flying around the small plane in circles, Rutherford said. Such high-powered jets would drop out of the sky if they tried to fly as slowly as the 100 mph Piper.
Rutherford figured he had a couple hours of fuel to spare and could have made the requested deviation, he told CNN, but pilots don’t like to take chances, especially over water.
“Someone once told me… the only time you have too much fuel in an airplane is when you’re on fire,” he said.
Eventually, he said, he was able to reach a compromise with the US Navy.
“We were far away enough from the aircraft carrier that they didn’t feel the need to shoot us down, and we were sufficiently close enough to our track that we felt we were going to get there safely,” Rutherford said.
Leaving nothing to chance, the US fighter jets kept up that circular pattern around the Piper for 30 minutes.
“They were just making sure that we didn’t suddenly descend and start aiming rather more aggressively toward any of their assets,” Rutherford said.
Once far enough east of the Lincoln, the jets said thank you and were off, he added.
Adventure done. At least until this weekend, when he planned to make the exact same flight again.
“At least there’s a ceasefire,” he told CNN ahead of that trip. “Sort of.”
Asked for comment on Rutherford’s interactions the military aircraft, US Central Command said it had no information to provide at this time.
