www.liveatc.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cWe have a possible Mayday. My wingman I believe may have taken a bird,\u201d the pilot reported. The controller offered to direct him to a nearby airport in Frankfort or Traverse City, but the pilot said his wingman had already crashed.<\/p>\n
Gutierrez said he hadn\u2019t heard anything about a possible bird strike, and said the crash is under investigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce we get some more information and it\u2019s approved, we can release it to you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Nathan Smith was working at a construction site about a mile from the crash. He said he started recording the passing fighter jet because something about its flight path struck him as odd.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was strange to see a jet flying that low and slow,\u201d Smith said. \u201cA few seconds after the video cuts, I heard a loud \u2018bang,\u2019 which I believe now to be the pilot ejecting, but I didn\u2019t think of that at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wendy Sobeck said she and her husband heard a \u201cvery loud crash\u201d down the road, minutes from their rural home.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought there was a car accident outside our house. We saw big billowing black smoke. We couldn\u2019t tell what it was, so my husband got into his pickup truck and saw what happened,\u201d Sobeck said. \u201cYou could see the plane debris in the field. Explosions kept happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fred Sobeck, 65, said he drove down the road and saw a \u201cbig fireball in the field\u201d near a house and a camper, which were not hit.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice told me to get out of there because of explosions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Emergency officials first directed nearby residents to shelter in place, but a short time later the Michigan State Police evacuated people within one mile because of a hazardous chemical spill related to the crash. The state police did not release details about the nature of the spill, but F-16 jets use hydrazine, a toxic chemical, as a component of emergency power unit fuel.<\/p>\n
By Thursday evening, the evacuation order had been lifted and residents were able to return to their homes near the crash site, according to Grand Traverse County Emergency Management.<\/p>\n
The jet was one of several F-16 aircraft from the Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, taking part in the Michigan training exercises, Gutierrez said.<\/p>\n
The military began flying the first F-16s in 1979. There have been at least 14 \u201cClass A mishaps\u201d involving F-16s since 2000, according to the Air Force Safety Center. The Class A mishap designation is generally used when the damage totals more than $2 million, when an aircraft is destroyed or when a service member is killed.<\/p>\n
In December, an F-16C Fighting Falcon with the Air Force\u2019s elite Thunderbirds demonstration squadron crashed<\/a> in the Southern California desert, and the pilot in that crash was also able to eject safely.<\/p>\n___ Associated Press reporters Josh Funk, Laura Turbay and Philip Marcelo contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT (AP) \u2014 An F-16 pilot safely ejected before the fighter jet crashed Thursday in rural Michigan, sending…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[152828,152829,146339,5617,152830,82,84,83],"class_list":["post-441799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-crashed","tag-ejected","tag-f-16","tag-pilot","tag-safely","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}