A F/A-18E SuperHornet from VFA-151, “The Vigilantes”, of Lemoore NAS, has crashed this morning near the Father Crowley Point or Outlook at Death Valley National Park. This is one of the popular places that airplane buffs go to watch military jets traverse the “Jedi” transition between two military aircraft operating areas. It’s also known as “Star Wars Canyon.” If you’ve seen youtube videos of military jets flying in a desert canyon, this is where the videos were taken.
I don’t know if the pilot(s) are O.K. but six bystanders have suffered injuries from debris.
Yeah, it’s sounding a bit like the first few pages of The Right Stuff. CFIT, GLOC-caused or not, seems awfully likely.
7 hurt now? I hope none are serious. As risk averse as I’ve read the US military is, I totally can see this being the end of low level flying there, limiting it to the boundaries of the actual gunnery ranges, that sort of thing.
My condolences for the injured and the family of the deceased.
It sounds like they located and evac’ed the pilot, but they’re not discussing his condition. A Search and Rescue helicopter from China Lake came in, and lowered a litter. Another F18 circled above that area until the helicopter arrived.
Do you have a link? Stories published/updated as recently as just 2 hours ago aren’t showing this news. And I didn’t see it when I googled just now to see that 2 hours ago was the most recent update.
Ah, ok: not my first link; the link in the OP. Thanks. They really need to do a re-write on that story; it doesn’t make sense the way they have it written now. I highly doubt he saw the mushroom cloud an immediately saw a helicopter lowering a litter, which is how it reads to me now.
You’ll never see it on YouTube, but my old man flew an F-86 through The Grand Canyon about 50 feet off the river. They confiscated his gun camera footage and he got a stern dressing down. I bet that was Epic! Every time he told the story, he got lower and faster.
Was the helo for the pilot, or for the one onlooker that got taken to the hospital?
Cynically, I like the account from the injured sightseeing group that, ‘we had no idea this was a spot to watch airplanes’. Why else would you be there?
I can find no other account of a helicopter lowering a gurney (I just checked again). The latest stories say “Crews are searching for the pilot of a US Navy fighter jet that crashed in Death Valley National Park,” so I’m going to say that no, they haven’t found anything. As I said earlier, I’ll be surprised if they find anything at all, even a piece of bone, given the description of the speed, explosion and resulting debris field.
It is a dramatic and beautiful canyon; the Rainbow in the name isn’t without merit.
The Panamint Valley is one of the more scenic parts of Death Valley. I don’t know about this particular vista point, but I know on the way out of Death Valley I stopped at a couple points on that highway to get photos of the view back towards Panamint Springs.
There’s like a bazillion planespotting videos on YouTube featuring fighters roaring through Star Wars Canyon. I’m a bit surprised that this incident wasn’t caught on video.
The quotes from the, IIRC French tour group that took the brunt of the injuries, read to me like someone was trying to prepare the ground for a negligence, failure of the duty to warn action against the Park Service. ‘We had no idea someone would fly airplanes here! There weren’t any warning signs or anything! We never would have sat on the edge of the canyon if we’d known…etc’ I’m probably paranoid.
I have driven that highway before, shortest path from Beatty to the Owens Valley, through Death Valley—at a balmy 121, per the visitor center—and couldn’t wait for the drive to be over. That it was in July, in a car with malfunctioning a/c, probably had a lot to do with it. I’ll take your word for it that people would visit, right there, sans airplanes.
I have read elsewhere that the pilot has not been recovered yet.
