A USAF F-15D Eagle crash-landed on Monday at Kingsley Field, an Air National Guard base in southern Oregon, and a photo of the plane swamped in a nearby waterway has emerged on social media.
According to a statement by the Air Force, the aircraft “departed the runway during landing … following a routine training mission.”
A photo posted on social media showed the two-seater fighter jet half-submerged in a drainage canal, with parts of its wing, empennage, and nose section resting above the water. The plane’s nose is buried in the earthen embankment, and its cockpit is cranked open, indicating the pilot did not eject during the debacle and climbed out afterward.
The USAF statement said that while the Eagle had two seats, just one pilot was inside at the time, who had been transferred to a nearby medical facility for evaluation.
The USAF adopted the F-15 in 1975 after ordering an air superiority fighter to fill the glaring weaknesses in its existing air fleet that had been exposed by the disastrous war in Vietnam, where US pilots flying fast but cumbersome interceptors were routinely outmatched by Vietnamese pilots in Soviet-made fighters. The F-15 was both high-tech and maneuverable and quickly became the USAF’s mainstay air superiority fighter, with more than 1,100 being built and several other nations buying the jets as well.
Kingsley Field was selected in 2022 to host the test program for the F-15EX, the latest advanced version of the fighter jet.