Idaho Air Show Midair Collision: How Four Navy Aviators Walked Away

At 12:10 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time on Sunday, May 17, 2026, two U.S. Navy EA-18G Growlers locked together over the Idaho high desert and came down about two miles from a crowd of spectators at Mountain Home Air Force Base.

What the eyewitness video shows

The most cited footage of the collision came from a spectator named Shane Ogden, who told reporters, "I was just filming, thinking they were going to split apart, and that happened, and I filmed the rest." The clip captures the precise sequence that the rest of the reporting has had to lean on, because the Naval Safety Command has not yet released any technical findings.

In the video the two Growlers appear to lock together in flight, pitch violently upward, stall, and then cartwheel toward the ground before exploding on impact. The wreckage came down roughly two miles northwest of the base, in Elmore County, Idaho, about an hour southeast of Boise. According to spectator video, both crews ejected within about five seconds of the collision. On the ground, witnesses then watched four parachutes open against a pale spring sky.

The air show announcer narrated the moment for the crowd in real time. As quoted by the Idaho Statesman, the announcer told spectators, "We had four good parachutes. The crews were able to eject." Within a couple of hours that informal count was confirmed up the chain. Cmdr. Amelia Umayam, spokesperson for Naval Air Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet, said in a statement, "All four of the aircrew successfully ejected, and they are being evaluated by medical personnel." Mountain Home Air Force Base followed with its own line later that day: "The aircrew involved in the incident are in stable condition."

Why a two-jet collision counted four aviators

The arithmetic of the day is the part most casual readers got wrong on first pass. Two airframes, four aviators. That is not a quirk of this particular demonstration; it is a design fact about the EA-18G Growler.

The Growler is a carrier-based electronic-warfare jet derived from the F/A-18F Super Hornet airframe. It is not a fighter in the usual sense. Each aircraft carries antennas and pods built to jam hostile radar and communications, and operating that suite of equipment requires two crew members, a naval aviator in the front seat and an electronic warfare officer in the back. Two seats per jet, multiplied across the two aircraft in the demonstration, put four naval aviators in the air at once.

The two Growlers involved were assigned to Electronic Attack Squadron 129, known as VAQ-129, the Navy's Growler training squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington. VAQ-129 supplies the demonstration team that flies the EA-18G on the U.S. air-show circuit, a role it inherited when the Growler replaced the EA-6B Prowler in the electronic-attack mission. The squadron has been a recurring presence on the schedule at Mountain Home, where the host unit, the 366th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Gunfighters, flies F-15E Strike Eagles from the same flight line.

The five seconds that kept everyone alive

The eyewitness account compresses the survival math into a small window. About five seconds elapsed between the moment the two jets locked together and the moment all four aircrew initiated ejection, according to spectator video. Two of the most advanced electronic-warfare jets in the U.S. inventory were destroyed in that interval. The four people inside them were not.

Both ejection seats on each aircraft fired cleanly. Four parachutes deployed. Kim Sykes, marketing director of Silver Wings of Idaho, summarized the ground-level reaction to the local press with one sentence: "Everyone is safe, and I think that's the most important thing." It is the rare aviation mishap that produces a complete set of clean ejections, and the rarity is part of why the official statements have been careful to say only that the aircrew were being evaluated and were in stable condition. The Navy has not released the names, hometowns, or family details of any of the four crew members.

A 25-acre grass fire and a closed highway

The crash converted a public open-house event into an active emergency response in minutes. One of the two Growlers came down on or near Highway 167, also known locally as Grandview Road, north of the base. The impact ignited a grass fire that burned about 25 acres of scrub before ground crews extinguished it.

Mountain Home Air Force Base went into temporary lockdown immediately. The Mountain Home Police Department issued a blunt public advisory: "Please DO NOT travel to or attempt to access Mountain Home Air Force Base as a spectator." Elmore County deputies and Idaho State Police closed State Highway 167 from Simco Road to State Highway 67, with a multi-day closure anticipated to manage the debris field. Elmcrest Street near the base also remained closed while emergency responders worked the scene. The remainder of the two-day Gunfighter Skies Air Show, which had the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds scheduled as the headline performers, was canceled.

Spectators who had driven in for a weekend air show watched a coordinated transition: announcers reporting four good parachutes, police pushing the crowd back from the perimeter, and grass-fire smoke rising along Grandview Road.

What the investigation will and will not answer

Midair collisions between military demonstration jets at U.S. air shows are historically rare, but they are a known operational risk of high-speed formation flying, and Mountain Home itself has precedent on the books. In 2003, a U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds aircraft crashed at the Mountain Home air show, with the pilot in that incident also ejecting safely. The Growler community has a more recent reference point as well: in 2024, a Whidbey Island-based EA-18G Growler crashed during a training flight near Mount Rainier in Washington state, an event already being mentioned in early commentary on this new mishap.

The cause of the May 17 collision is, for now, an open question. The Naval Safety Command, together with the Navy and the Air Force, has opened a joint mishap investigation. Publishing a final report on an aviation mishap of this kind typically takes months. In the meantime, the wreckage of the two Growlers and the flight recorders will be moved off the public roads near the base and examined at a secure facility. The eyewitness video and the announcer's count are the only sequence-of-events sources currently in the public record.

Four aviators, four parachutes, an open investigation, a closed highway. The high desert around Mountain Home was quiet again by dusk.

Sources

• NPR, Military aircrew in 'stable condition' following midair collision at Idaho air show
• Task & Purpose, Aircrews safely eject after two Navy jets collide during air show
• KIVI / Idaho News, 4 aircrew eject after crash during Gunfighter Skies Air Show
• Idaho News, Two F-18 fighter jets have crashed during an airshow at Mountain Home Air Force Base
• Fox News, Two Navy jets crash midair as crew successfully ejects during Idaho military base air show