Two U.S. Navy EA18-G Growlers collided and crashed Sunday during an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho, sending four crew members parachuting to safety as spectators watched the aircraft fall in flames. The jets, from Electronic Attack Squadron 129 in Whidbey Island, Washington, were performing an aerial demonstration when they made contact and spun down together.
Videos posted online by spectators showed four parachutes opening in the sky as the aircraft descended near the base, which is about 50 miles south of Boise. Shane Ogden, who was filming from the crowd, said he had the two jets in frame as they came close together. His video shows the aircraft appearing to touch, then twist in tandem as the crew ejects, their parachutes blooming overhead before the planes drop and explode into a fireball on impact.
All four crew members ejected safely and were being evaluated by medical personnel, and nobody at the base was hurt. The base said in a social media post that it went into lockdown after the incident. Idaho Transportation said SH-167 was closed from Simco Rd to SH-67 near Mountain Home Air Force Base because of the crash and the investigation, and the closure was expected to last for multiple days. An air show can be built around spectacle, but it is also a tightly managed exercise in risk, and Sunday’s crash brought that reality into sharp focus for everyone who saw it happen.
This year’s Gunfighter Skies event was the first at the base since 2018, when a hang glider died in a crash during an air show performance there. The show, which included flying demonstrations and parachute jumps, was headlined both days by the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. The base has seen other serious moments in the past as well, including a 2003 crash of a Thunderbirds aircraft while attempting a maneuver, though the pilot ejected less than a second before impact and was not hurt.
Those incidents land against an air show industry that has spent years trying to improve safety across roughly 200 events held each year in the United States. The last fatal crash at an air show came in 2022, when two vintage military planes collided at an event in Dallas and killed six people. The weather was not the obvious culprit on Sunday: the National Weather Service reported good visibility and winds gusting up to 29 mph around the time of the crash. In the crowd, Kim Sykes summed up what mattered most after the smoke cleared, saying everyone was safe and that was the most important thing.
For Gunfighter Skies, the question now is not whether the show drew attention; it did. It is whether investigators can explain how two Navy jets in a controlled demonstration came together so close to the base, and whether that answer changes anything for the next air show at Mountain Home. The facts that matter most are already clear: the crew lived, the base was spared, and the rest is now a matter for the inquiry.
