Two Navy EA-18G Growlers Collide Mid-Air at Mountain Home Idaho Air Show; All Four Aviators Eject Safely

Two U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler electronic-attack jets collided in mid-air over Mountain Home Air Force Base in southern Idaho on Sunday afternoon, ending the second day of the Gunfighter Skies air show in a fireball, but all four aviators ejected and survived, defense officials said. The collision happened at 12:10 p.m. local time as the jets, performing a tight aerial demonstration in front of an estimated 60,000 spectators, clipped each other and tumbled toward the desert floor. Video captured by audience members and broadcast by local stations showed both aircraft breaking apart in flight, followed by four parachutes opening and then a pillar of black smoke as the wreckage burned in scrubland just west of the runway.

The aircraft were assigned to Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ-129, the Navy's Growler training squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state, the Navy confirmed in a statement Sunday night. All four crew members — two pilots and two electronic warfare officers — were taken to area hospitals and were in stable condition Monday morning, with the Navy declining to release names pending family notification. No one on the ground was injured. The base went into a brief lockdown while emergency crews extinguished the fires and an Idaho State Police perimeter went up around the impact site to secure classified electronic-warfare equipment carried aboard the jets.

The Growler is the Navy's only manned electronic-attack platform, a two-seat variant of the F/A-18F Super Hornet packed with jammers, sensors and the ALQ-249 Next Generation Jammer system designed to suppress enemy radar and communications. Each aircraft costs roughly $68 million, putting the immediate hardware loss alone at more than $136 million, not counting the classified mission systems. The Navy has 158 Growlers in its inventory and has been steadily upgrading the fleet over the past three years; Sunday's crash is the second non-combat Growler accident this year and the deadliest involving the type since 2019, when both crew members survived a crash in Washington state.

The air show, the largest annual military open house in the Pacific Northwest, was canceled for the day. Brigadier General Steven Behmer, commander of the 366th Fighter Wing at Mountain Home, told reporters at an evening news conference that the formation had been performing what the Navy calls a "section break" — a high-G maneuver in which two aircraft separate sharply in front of the crowd line. "Our crews trained for this for months," Behmer said. "Today something went wrong, and we are going to find out exactly what." The Navy convened a Class A mishap investigation board late Sunday; preliminary findings are typically published within 30 days, with a full report often taking up to a year.

The incident reignited a familiar debate over the safety of live aerobatic displays at military air shows. Senator Jim Risch, R-Idaho, who attended the show with his grandchildren, called for an immediate review of show choreography across the Defense Department, telling reporters that "the public deserves a thrilling show, but our crews deserve a margin of error." The Pentagon's last comprehensive aviation-safety review, completed in 2018 after a string of fatal crashes, recommended tighter formation tolerances in airshow profiles but did not curtail the displays themselves. Naval Air Forces commander Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever issued a statement Sunday night noting that "the fact that four aviators stepped off the wreckage today is a testament to training, discipline and an extraordinary ejection-seat system" — a reference to the Martin-Baker SJU-17 seats fitted to the Super Hornet family, which have now saved more than 80 American aviators since entering service.