At about seven in the morning on 2 September, a grey four-engined Hercules bristling with antennas rolled down the runway at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona and climbed into the desert haze. Its callsign was VOLT01. Six hours later it came home, and with that landing the U.S. Air Force closed the book on one of the least glamorous and most quietly decisive aircraft it has ever flown.

The aircraft was EC-130H 73-1590, the last Compass Call in the active inventory. It never dropped a bomb. It never shot anything down. What it did instead was make enemy radios useless — and in four decades of American air campaigns, that turned out to matter enormously.

A 55th Wing spokesperson confirmed the “fini flight” to Air & Space Forces Magazine. A formal retirement ceremony follows at Davis-Monthan on 18 September.

The jet that made the enemy go quiet

Compass Call was never subtle to look at. Take a C-130H Hercules, hang enormous antenna arrays off the fuselage, add fairings, bolt pods under the wings, and you have an aircraft whose job is written all over it. It went to work on enemy command, control, communications and computer networks — blocking, jamming and corrupting the signals that let an air defence system function as a system rather than a collection of unhappy individual radars.

That put it inside the American suppression-of-enemy-air-defences triad, working alongside the Navy’s EA-18G Growler and the Air Force’s Wild Weasel F-16CM. The Weasels killed the radars. The Growlers jammed them. Compass Call went after the conversation between them.

The type first flew in 1981 and entered service in the early 1980s. Its combat debut came over Panama during Operation Just Cause in 1989. Desert Storm followed in 1991, then Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999, then more than two decades of near-continuous work over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

It stayed busy right to the end. Aircraft spotters logged an EC-130H landing in the Caribbean last December, days before Operation Absolute Resolve. U.S. Central Command confirmed the type flew in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the air campaign against Iran. Forty-odd years into its career, the Air Force still could not spare it.

“VOLT01 right base, gear, full stop”

The last approach was watched from the fence line. Aviation photographer Steven Fortson was at Davis-Monthan and caught the whole thing, including an EA-37B working the pattern at the same moment and an F-16D of the 152nd Fighter Squadron from nearby Morris Air National Guard Base flying what was almost certainly the camera ship, its back-seater shooting the formation.

It is a mundane transmission. A landing clearance readback, the same words spoken tens of thousands of times a day at airfields everywhere. It is also the last thing an EC-130H crew ever said on the radio, and the fact that the type ended on a routine call rather than a flypast feels exactly right for an aircraft that spent its whole life doing unglamorous work very well.

Why it had to stop

The end had been coming for over a decade. The Air Force first announced plans to retire the EC-130 in 2014 and in 2017 awarded a contract — to what was then L3 Technologies — to lift the mission systems out of the Hercules and drop them into business jets. The first Compass Calls started leaving the fleet at the turn of the decade, and the 14-aircraft force was culled steadily from there.

The airframes simply ran out. Pentagon budget documents noted the fleet had reached the end of its programmed depot maintenance life and was being flown under waivers because retirement was already scheduled. The last aircraft’s waiver was due to expire on 30 September 2026. Keeping the type alive for up to two more years was priced at roughly $14 million per aircraft — money the Air Force would rather spend on what comes next.

Enter the Banshee

What comes next is the EA-37B Compass Call, a Gulfstream G550 with the same brain in a much better body. Around 70 percent of the EC-130H’s electronic warfare systems moved across essentially unchanged. The airframe underneath them is faster, flies far higher, ranges further and — crucially for a service counting every dollar — costs dramatically less per hour to operate. Crew size drops from 13 to nine.

The first EA-37B arrived at Davis-Monthan in August 2024. The type deployed in support of Operation Epic Fury in late March 2026, making its combat debut before it had even been formally declared operational, and more aircraft went to the United Kingdom in July as the fighting with Iran dragged on.

Right now the Air Force has five EA-37Bs from an order of ten, with plans to grow the fleet to 22 aircraft through 2031 — a bigger force than the EC-130H fleet it replaces. That expansion is the real story here. Electronic warfare is not being quietly retired along with the Hercules. It is being scaled up.

A look inside the EC-130H Compass Call and the mission that kept it flying for more than forty years.

Somewhere over southern Arizona on the type’s last day, a propeller-driven jammer designed in the Carter administration flew formation with the business jet that replaces it. The two aircraft look nothing alike. Inside, they are very nearly the same machine.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine, The Aviationist, U.S. Air Force / DVIDS, Steven Fortson (@zaphod58), U.S. Department of Defense FY2025 force structure documents.