Two F-16 Fighting Falcons had a midair collision in Oklahoma on Monday, forcing one of the pilots to eject safely and abandon the aircraft, while the other was able to pilot back to Tulsa.
According to News on 6, the crashed jet went down three miles north of Moline in an open field, landing on its belly and becoming a flaming wreck upon impact. Col. Max Moss with the Oklahoma National Guard said both pilots are fine, and suffered no serious injuries.
"You could look right down main street . . . and see the smoke," Moline City Clerk Lisa Townsley
told The Wichita Eagle.
Both jets were operated by the 138th Fighter Wing of the Oklahoma Air National Guard based out of Tulsa International Airport, and often use the Smoky Hill Bombing Range in northern Kansas for training missions.
Moline resident Elaine Julian was in a town park around 2:30 p.m. with her twin 4-year-old great-grandsons when they saw the planes.
"I said, 'Come on and let’s see if we can find the jets,'" Julian
told TulsaWorld.com.
"So we were looking up at the sky and we saw some puffs of smoke, and we could see that there was an airplane in one of those puffs and it was kind of zig-zagging and looked like it was having some trouble. Probably a couple more seconds after that, the noise stopped. It went behind a tree so we couldn’t see it as it hit (the ground), but we heard a loud boom."
That's when she and her great-grandsons returned home to find a piece of one of the planes in her yard.
"It just looked like a big leaf and it floated down to the ground, and it smelled of fuel. It was kind of a real thin fiberglass and it was about 8 to 10 inches long and 4 inches wide," she said.
After calling the city clerk to report the debris, Air Force personnel dropped by to pick it up and take an account of what she saw.
Following the accident, the U.S. Air Force said it would appoint an investigation team to look into the condition of the pilots, as well as the maintenance of the planes. Typically reports are completed after several months or, in some cases, a year.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.