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A fighter jet flying in Yankee Air Museum’s Thunder over Michigan air show at the Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti crashed Sunday just after 4 p.m., as thousands of spectators, including children, watched in horror.
The two aboard ejected before the jet went down, but the plane burst into a raging fireball when it hit the ground, narrowly missing an apartment building and hitting vehicles but not injuring anyone. Emergency crews rushed to the scent to extinguish the flames.
The plane, a former Soviet — now Russian — MiG-23 aircraft, was doing aerial maneuvers. . It was not immediately clear what malfunction led the two aboard to eject and the jet to crash. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating. Videos taken by spectators and posted on social media appeared to show an explosion just before the two people in the jet ejected
“The pilot and backseater successfully ejected from the aircraft before the crash,” Randy Wimbley, a spokesman for the Wayne County Airport Authority said “While it did not appear they sustained any significant injuries, first responders transported the pair to a nearby hospital as a precaution.”
The plane, Wimbley said, crashed into the parking lot at the Waverly on the Lake Apartments in Belleville, striking unoccupied vehicles in the apartment complex’s parking lot, but “no one at the apartment complex nor the air show was injured.”
By some accounts, the MiG-23 — which could go faster than the speed of sound — has a cockpit that considered an improvement over previous Soviet fighters with a more ergonomic layout. But pilot visibility reportedly was poor and the ejection seat wrapped around the pilot’s head.
Sunday’s crash falls on the heels of two fatal ones last month as an air show was underway in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. A helicopter and a gyrocopter collided in mid air, leaving two dead and two injured. Two others died earlier in the day when a single-engine plane went into nearby Lake Winnebago.
In 2011, there was a death at the air show at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township, when a man attempted to go from a plane to a helicopter too early, lunging for the chopper skid before the two craft were in position, according to the crash investigation.
Sunday, witnesses — including people who were not at the airshow but close enough to seen it — posted video of the crash Sunday to social media. They described a loud boom and then plumes of dark smoke rising south of the airport.
The pilot, listed as Dan Filer in the program, and backseater can be seen ejecting, as their parachutes opened and eased them back to the ground. Some media accounts reported the two have been found safe, and in stable condition.
In one video, a witness’s voice could he heard saying, “Oh my God.”
The two-day show was celebrating its 25th anniversary, and Sunday was the last day.
Matthew Gerick, who was at the show, watched the two people eject, and then the plane zoom to the ground.
“Like did we just watch that happen?” he told the Free Press he thought. “I was sitting over on Beck Road watching the plane fly out towards 94 when it kept getting lower and lower. Then my wife and I saw the black smoke so we drove down to see the crash on 94 and it landed right next to the apartment building.”
Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Jet crashes during Ypsilanti air show in Ypsilanti, pilot ejects
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