Former RAF pilot John Peters who was captured during the Gulf War in 1991 after his plane was shot down says it is ‘a game of cat and mouse’ as the Iranians hunt for the missing US airman after downing a US jet. 

Speaking about his own ordeal in detail as the US bid to find their airman before Iran do, Mr Peters, who was held alongside fellow airman John Nichol for seven weeks during the first Gulf War during which time both men were tortured and paraded on Iraqi television, said ‘the transition was shocking’ when they were forced to eject from their plane ‘and a position of power in the air’.

‘You land in enemy territory. You have just gone through an extreme event where you’ve been shot out of the sky and you have just ejected.

‘I had ejected at 320 feet so I was only on my parachute for ten seconds. You are then on the ground. We had gone from a position of power in the air – involved in this huge air power – like this poor American crew would have done – to literally just John and I being two little pink bodies in the desert.

‘The transition is just shocking. The first thing we did was to giggle which was really pathetic actually thinking ‘what the hell do we do now?’.’

Describing the dramatic moment their plane was hit and they were engulfed in ‘an orange doughnut of flames’ and his thoughts in the cockpit as they prepared to eject, he said: ‘It is defined by the moment – when we got hit by the missile, the aircraft rotated a couple of times and we were only 50-60 feet above the ground doing about 500 or 600 knots at the time and then you have to deal with the anti-aircraft guns.

‘Basically, it is a trained response and you are trying to solve problems but I couldn’t see the back of the aircraft. 

‘It was completely orange flame and was about a 15 feet doughnut around my plane – I couldn’t see the aircraft’s right hand wing – then you click into a trained response and I know this sounds boring but this is why we are trained so much so you realise that you now have to eject because this aircraft is going to disintegrate around us so you then go through the checks to eject and that is when you eject.

Former RAF pilot John Peters (pictured) was captured during the Gulf War in 1991 after his plane was shot down 

Peters (pictured) recalled today how he and his airman John Nichol were held for seven weeks, during which time both men were tortured and paraded on Iraqi TV 

‘That is the first time you will have done it because you never eject in practice but you have complete faith that you pull that handle and you will be out of the aircraft and that is how it is.’

Recalling the ‘initial shock on the ground’ they experienced and what the US crew would have gone through when their plane was shot down, he said: ‘You then literally because of your training put the next cassette in as it were and think we now need to evade and that is exactly what that American crew will be doing now.’

Speaking on Sky News, Mr Peters suggested what would now be going through the minds of the remaining US airman still in Iran following the safe retrieval of his or her colleague.

‘Much of it will the training and I won’t go into what we were taught by the sophistication will have increased but it will have increased on both sides so the stakes are the same really and it is a game of cat and mouse. 

‘The US has got to find their colleague and they will have combat search and rescue squadrons who will do that and plan how to get that person out as – as you can imagine – the Iranians will be saturating the area as best they can because this is now a political game because that gives them huge leverage.’