A retired Russian fighter jet flying in Yankee Air Museum’s Thunder over Michigan air show at the Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti crashed just after 4 p.m. Sunday, 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 adjacent to Interstate 94 in Van Buren Township and hitting vehicles but not injuring anyone. Emergency crews rushed 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 appeared to show an explosion 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 on Denton Road at the I-94 service drive, striking unoccupied vehicles, but "no one at the apartment complex nor the air show was injured." One photo posted on Facebook showed what appeared to be the charred tail section of the plane just feet away from one of the apartment complex buildings.
By some accounts, the MiG-23 — which could go faster than the speed of sound — has a cockpit that was 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 midair, 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.
On Sunday, witnesses — including people who were not at the air show but close enough to see it — posted video of the crash 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 were in stable condition after being rescued.
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 after the plane went down.. "I was sitting over on Beck Road watching the plane fly out toward (I-)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.
