F-16 Skids Off Runway in South Dakota, Marking the Latest Air Force Landing Mishap

An F-16 Combating Falcon fighter jet skidded off a runway and stopped when its nostril cone dipped onto the airfield throughout a coaching mission in South Dakota on Wednesday, in response to the Air Nationwide Guard. 

An unverified picture of the fighter jet, primarily based out of the 114th Fighter Wing in Sioux Falls, started circulating on-line. The Air Nationwide Guard issued a press release in regards to the incident on Fb shortly after the image was posted, explaining that the plane “went off the tip of Runway 15 at Joe Foss Subject.”

The crew and pilot had been secure, emergency crews got here to the scene and the Air Nationwide Guard is investigating the incident, in response to the 114th Fighter Wing. No particulars are being launched in regards to the pilot.

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“Although we practice to do that day-after-day, there’s nonetheless threat concerned. We’re grateful that nobody was harmed on this incident,” Col. Mark Morrell, the 114th Fighter Wing commander, mentioned in a press release.

However Wednesday’s runway mishap is the newest in a string of touchdown mishaps and crashes seen this yr with the Air Pressure’s jets. 

In late March, an F-16 piloted by the son of a candidate to be the Oklahoma lawyer basic crashed in rural Louisiana throughout a coaching train.

The Air Pressure has been flying the earliest variations of the F-16 because the late Nineteen Seventies and particularly the F-16 C/D variant — which is flown by South Dakota’s 114th Fighter Wing — because the mid-Nineteen Eighties.

There have been three F-16 mishaps final yr, in response to the Air Pressure Security Heart. One of many crashes led to the loss of life of a pilot and the airplane being utterly destroyed. 

The identical week because the F-16 crash in Louisiana, airmen started posting a picture of an F-22 Raptor with its nostril buried within the floor at Eglin Air Pressure Base, Florida, after the plane had an obvious touchdown gear mishap.

An virtually similar incident occurred with one other F-22 at Eglin final yr, when a pilot skilled an in-flight emergency and the entrance touchdown gear did not function correctly, inflicting the nostril to dip and affect the bottom on the runway.

Air Pressure Security Heart information exhibits that 5 Raptors had accidents in 2021, costing taxpayers upward of $600,000 every.

Proof from Wednesday’s incident is being collected for investigation by an Interim Security Board, in response to the 114th Fighter Wing. 

Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute who makes a speciality of navy readiness, informed Army.com after the F-22 mishap that these frequent mechanical points trigger critical issues for the power.

“There’s a hyperlink between the age of plane requiring extra upkeep, which ends up in lowered flying hours,” Eaglen mentioned. “That is the smallest, oldest Air Pressure in historical past.”

In final yr’s finances request, the service needed to slash flight time by roughly 87,500 hours due to the heavy prices related to upkeep of many growing older plane.

On this yr’s finances, the Air Pressure is requesting 1.1 million flying hours — probably the most the service can tackle financially and probably the most its growing older plane can deal with.

— Thomas Novelly could be reached at thomas.novelly@navy.com. Comply with him on Twitter @TomNovelly.

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