Navy F 18 Crash: Jet Slams Into Apartments In Virginia Beach, Virginia

A U.S. Navy jet crashed into an apartment complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on Friday afternoon. CNN reports that the plane -- an F/A-18D assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 106 -- slammed into the Mayfair Mews Apartment complex, setting several apartments on fire.

The US Navy reported that both pilots ejected from the plane, but are being transported to the local hospital for observation.

The burning fuselage of an F/A-18 Hornet lies smoldering after crashing into a residential building in Virginia Beach, Va., Friday, April 6, 2012. (AP Photo)

The video posted below appears to show the fire and smoke after the crash:

SEE MORE VIDEOS on HuffPost here.

The U.S. Navy released the following statement:

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (NNS) -- An F/A-18D assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 106 crashed in Virginia Beach, Va. April 6.

Initial reports indicate that at approximately 12:05 p.m., the jet crashed just after takeoff at a location just off of the base.

Both aircrew safely ejected from the aircraft.

VFA-106 is based at Naval Air Station Oceana, and serves as the East Coast Fleet Replacement Squadron. Their mission is to train Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18 Replacement Pilots and Weapon Systems Officers (WSOs) to support fleet commitments.

The Navy is coordinating with local authorities.

WAVY.com posted photos of the crash, which reportedly shut down traffic on I-264. WTKR NewsChannel 3, a CBS affiliate, also posted photos of the crash on Facebook.

More photos and video from the crash:

Smoke rises from the burning fuselage of an F/A-18 Hornet after the jet crashed into an apartment building in Virginia Beach, Va., Friday, April 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Caitlin Goforth)

New picture of Navy jet crash in Virginia Beach courtesy of @z104fm #Navy #Jet #Crash twitter.com/djpostl/status…

— Dj PostL (@djpostl) April 6, 2012

[UPDATED AT 6:00PM EST] Read the full report from the Associated Press below:

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Two Navy pilots ejected from a fighter jet Friday, sending their unmanned plane careening into a Virginia Beach apartment complex and engulfing several buildings in flames.

The plane had dumped loads of fuel before crashing, though it wasn't clear if that was because of a malfunction or an intentional maneuver by the pilots, said Capt. Mark Weisgerber with U.S. Fleet Forces Command.

Seven people were injured, including both pilots, though all were expected to survive. Authorities were still combing through the wreckage of some 40 apartment units, and they said some residents of the complex still had not been accounted for.

The pilots were a student and instructor, Weisgerber said.

Bruce Nedelka, the Virginia Beach EMS division chief, said that witnesses saw fuel being dumped from the jet before it went down, and that fuel was found on buildings and vehicles in the area.

The plane not having as much fuel on board "mitigated what could have been an absolute massive, massive fireball and fire," Nedelka said. "With all of that jet fuel dumped, it was much less than what it could have been."

The crash happened in the Hampton Roads area, which has a large concentration of military bases, including Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world. Naval Air Station Oceana, where the F/A-18D that crashed was assigned, is located in Virginia Beach.

Dozens of police cars, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles filled the densely populated neighborhood where the plane crashed. Yellow fire hoses snaked through side streets as fire crews poured water on the charred rooftops of brick apartment houses. By late afternoon, the fire had been put out.

Residents of the apartment complex described a confusing scene and an apologetic pilot.

Colby Smith said his house started shaking and then the power went out, as he saw a red and orange blaze outside his window. He ran outside, where he saw billowing black smoke and then came upon the pilot as he ran to a friend's home.

"I saw the parachute on the house and he was still connected to it, and he was laying on the ground with his face full of blood," Smith told WVEC-TV.

"The pilot said, `I'm sorry for destroying your house.'"

Smith said he and another man helped the pilot onto the street.

Patrick Kavanaugh, who lives in the complex where the jet crashed, opened up his sliding glass door after hearing a loud explosion and saw one of the jet's pilots on the ground with blood on his face. Kavanaugh said the pilot, whom he described as a "young boy," was very upset and apologetic.

"The poor guy was in shock. I checked for broken bones and opened wounds," said Kavanaugh, who spent 23 years in the rescue squad and retired in 1996.

Despite having suffered several heart attacks and open-heart surgery, Kavanaugh said his old rescue skills kicked in as he dragged the pilot around the corner and away from the fire before several other explosions occurred.

As authorities closed roads in the neighborhood, traffic backed up on side streets and on nearby Interstate 264, with slow-moving columns of vehicles bringing drivers to a virtual standstill early Friday afternoon.

Edna Lukens, who works at the apartment complex across the street from the crash, said she saw three apartment buildings on fire.

"We heard this loud noise and we looked out the window and there was smoke all in the sky. Then the flames started going up in the sky, and then the apartment building just started burning and the police was called and everybody came out," Lukens said.

Felissa Ezell, 71, was sitting in a folding chair outside her townhouse near the crash site Friday and recalled hearing the crash as she returned home earlier in the day.

"Oh, my God, I heard three really loud explosions, then the black smoke went up high in the sky," she said.

The same model of fighter jet, an F/A-18D, crashed in December 2008 while returning to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar after a training exercise in a San Diego neighborhood. That crash killed four members of one family and destroyed two homes.

The Marine Corps said the jet suffered a mechanical failure, but a series of bad decisions led the pilot – a student – to bypass a potentially safe landing at a coastal Navy base after his engine failed. The pilot ejected and told investigators he screamed in horror as he watched the jet plow into the neighborhood, incinerating two homes. A federal judge ordered the U.S. government to pay the family nearly $18 million in restitution.

This is a breaking news update. Please stay tuned for details.

Comments

[oldcoastie]

12:41 PM on 04/10/2012

The new breed of jets fly so low as to make the walls and windows vibrate, wake our kids at 10 PM, and rattle the crap out of everyone. We have all learned to live with this, but we question the necessity of it. If you look at an aerial map, there is a strip of land between the coast and the base with little residential infiltration; why not take off / land so the planes fly 80-90% over the ocean? I have heard "wind issues." Thought you would need to learn to fly in all types of wind patterns, as you take off / land across the globe. In addition, isn't the benefit having a base so close to the coast to prep for aircraft carrier takeoffs / landings? Wondering if a little thougth was put into it, would it be best to move the random touch-and-gos to a less densely populated base and save Oceana for coastal maneuvering and off-shore flights.

[Nicole Hays]

07:15 AM on 04/13/2012

That base was there before everything else. Why not stop building around it? Why don't people understand that you're in a training/fly zone. If you chose to live that close to base, that's your own risk. People shouldn't go into without thinking about it first.

[origamib]

03:09 PM on 04/08/2012

Here's the deal, in my lifetime (and the vast majority of that has been spent living here) there have been hundreds of thousands of touch and gos (flight training simulating hopping on and off an aircraft carrier) and tons of other training missions that have occurred, safely and without mishap. I can count on one hand the number of unfortunate accidents that have occurred during that same time frame.
You are billions of times more likely to be hit by a car than by an F-18 in VB. Should the city have avoided zoning residential so close to the base? Probably. But considering the statistically likelyhood of a crash, and the very valuable land this near the ocean, they have been, perhaps understandably, greedy. Tourism helps us VB homeowners out quite a bit, but valuable developed and privately owned land brings valuable property tax income to the city's coffers.

[origamib]

03:06 PM on 04/08/2012

Yes, as residents we have a love/hate relationship with the jet base.
Pros--our neighbors are the very people flying/maintaining these machines (and we, as a general rule, are neighborly people).
We are actually very proud of the young men and women who serve and call our city home.
More cynically, the local economy is very positively impacted by the presence of the base and it's inhabitants.
Cons--Obviously, the potential for a mishap such as this one.
Jet fuel is a pain to wash off your windshield (it's kind of sticky),
and you sometimes have to tell the person on the other end of the phone to hang on until the "Sound of Freedom" stops circling your head as you can't hear a word they are saying until then.
Knowing that if ever anyone was stupid enough to lob a ICBM at our coast, well, we'd be crispy and aromatic before just about anyone else because of the jet base in our vicinity.
Of course there are also days like 9/11 when you suddenly feel really glad to see all those people in jets go screaming off into the distance doing the job they were trained to do.

[origamib]

03:05 PM on 04/08/2012

Without getting too detailed about my own personal whereabouts--I live in this city.
My brother and his family live, literally, no less than 6000 feet away from the runways there these jets take off and land, sometimes hundreds of times a day.

Yes, there is always a risk. When you purchase a home, you get a disclaimer about where your property lies in conjunction to the CURRENT flight paths (which have been known to change somewhat from time to time) and information about how many decibels of jet noise you can expect on a daily basis. I don't know if renters are given quite as much information as landlord--but you know where the base is, you can see the pilots (sometimes pretty close) as they fly overhead, and even if you are stone deaf the vibration of an F-18 flying overhead is hard to miss.

[Back of The Line Pedro]

02:20 PM on 04/08/2012

Isn't it amazing that a massive F-16 couldn't even bring down an apartment building yet two jets on 9-11 could make the entire World Trade center (seven buildings) entirely disintegrate? Most amazing of all is that one of the buildings was two blocks away and was never hit by ANYTHING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2GXaiTAUdw

[MsMarchHare]

08:14 PM on 04/08/2012

it was an F-18, hardly massive, and had dumped most of its fuel prior to crashing, unlike 2 airliners with full fuel tanks crashing directly into 2 buildings beyond the reach of fire equipment.

[Back of The Line Pedro]

08:58 PM on 04/08/2012

Now explain how Building 7, a 52 story building two blocks away which was hit by nothing imploded for no reason.

[jasonhen]

03:09 PM on 04/10/2012

The real question to ask is how come the large tail of the jet is still distinguishable, whereas the entire 747 that crashed into the Pentagon disintegrated and nothing resembling an airplane could be found at the crash site.

[kellyslk]

02:00 PM on 04/08/2012

Hummmm Wonder if the student passed and got his license?

[shylove2]

01:57 PM on 04/08/2012

and you never know the military PR could be disinformation on casualties... image, image, image...

[YAMO]

08:22 AM on 04/08/2012

Although we don't know the cause of the accident, it's pretty obvious from how close the pilots landed to the crash site, that they waited until the last second or two to eject. Apparently they were convinced that the could land their crippled craft on the runway. It truely is amazing no one was killed. Had the pilots deemed the aircraft uncontrollable they would have ejected and ditched their F18/A over open water. No second guessing here.

[tedr53]

05:36 PM on 04/08/2012

4 members of one family were killed. Why this fact wasn't in the first paragraph we can only surmise. No bad news about the troops...

[charlezmail]

07:00 PM on 04/08/2012

The same model of fighter jet, an F/A-18D, crashed in December 2008 while returning to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar after a training exercise in a San Diego neighborhood. That crash killed four members of one family and destroyed two homes.

That was an earlier crash. As of now there have been no reported deaths on this crash.

[YAMO]

05:59 AM on 04/10/2012

Wrong crash.

[surfinnonreality]

11:34 AM on 04/10/2012

They were trying for open water. The suspected problem was a massive engine failure. F-18s don't glide. Their flight is dependent on sustained power. No engine - no power - no flight. The engines failed as they were taking off. The runway was closer than the water. The fact that they ejected so close to the ground shows they did their best to use what control they had to put it in the apartment courtyard and not let it fly blindly after a higher altitude ejection. It is a tribute to the skill of the pilot that no one was killed. Sounds like you were second guessing.

[Durendal33]

07:01 AM on 04/08/2012

thats a cool $100 million to replace the jet fighter and then some to rebuild the complex and compensate the residents.

[YAMO]

07:33 AM on 04/08/2012

Just the cost of freedom!

[Durendal33]

11:33 AM on 04/08/2012

Yeah you are about to be invaded by..well...no one.

[Dan and Suzanne Cox]

06:24 AM on 04/08/2012

Heck of a way to drop in for lunch.

[BuckyJamesDio]

11:23 PM on 04/07/2012

I knew that upon coming to the comments section that there would be endless speculation that the pilots either did this on purpose or were just willfully endangering lives.

My question is why would they do that? No, seriously, I invite anyone who has posited such an opinion as to what gain could have been gotten from this. For anyone.

Really. Step forward and dazzle us with your brilliance. Give us a reason to believe this was intentional.

[Rich Cash]

11:02 PM on 04/07/2012

This is a tragic event. Thank God no one was killed. All the comments about the Navy being at fault in this case are simply untrue. The Navy has been flying aircraft from NAS Oceana since WWII. The people who built homes, apartments, and resorts in the area knew that training flights were being conducted from Oceana and have lobbied successfully for zoning permits anyway.

[Shaun Poore]

08:53 AM on 04/10/2012

The pilots likely did all they were supposed to do in that situation. I live down there those jets get up to pretty high speeds. Where it crash landed in regards to Oceana The pilots likely weren't in the air for more than a minute or two and likely didn't have the ability to make it out to the ocean or turn around. They truly did perform a heroing act to crash land anywhere in that area without killing somebody.

That being said about the pilots doing all they could and possibly even being heroes here. Anytime a Navy jet crashes in a residential area the Navy is at fault. If this turns out it was a massive mechanical failure, it's the Navy's fault somewhere down the pipeline of constructing, maintaining and inspecting these jets prior to takeoff.

[Ben Wilson]

10:08 PM on 04/07/2012

Nothing but a tragic accident. Perhaps less planes shoud fly over residential areas, I'm all for that if it can be helped, but this is a pretty rare thing, I don't see the need to politick.

[Maggie Bent]

12:29 PM on 04/08/2012

Nice racism, racist.

[pitbull1779]

01:03 PM on 04/08/2012

i know.. im sorry.
:-(

[origamib]

02:30 PM on 04/08/2012

Mods--please take a look at this ^^^^ (pitbull1779) posting.
Thanks.

[euryalus36]

03:01 PM on 04/07/2012

Let me address a few points that have been made. The first one is the base should move. That is absurd. That base, as with most airports were built long before there were houses there. Houses came after the base/airport was established. If you want to take issue, take issue with the zoning commissions which zoned that area for residential use. They are the true guilty parties. Bases/airports are a great source of revenue for the area, so if one were to leave there would be massive unemployment. From what I read, the pilots stayed with the airplane as long as possible. The fact they landed in the accident area would indicate they ejected nanoseconds before impact, that’s a blink of the eye. Just after takeoff if a mechanical irregularity occurs, you don’t have a lot of time to deal with it. The most dangerous position for an airplane to be in is low and slow and that is exactly what a takeoff is. The fact the pilots were dumping fuel as fast as they could indicates they were trying to minimize damage on the ground. If the pilots could have gone “feet wet” over water, I am certain they would have, the fact that they didn’t would indicate they didn’t have too much control over where the airplane was going.

[JIM Hilton]

04:34 PM on 04/07/2012

VERY WELL SAID