Investigators examine Blue Angel wreckage - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Investigators examine Blue Angel wreckage

PENSACOLA, Fla. — The Navy Blue Angels returned home to regroup after one of their jets crashed during a maneuver, killing a pilot who was performing in one of his first air shows with the team.

Investigators were sifting through the wreckage to determine what caused the aircraft to crash Saturday, killing Lt. Cmdr. Kevin J. Davis.

Davis, 32, of Pittsfield, Mass., was in his second year with the Blue Angels, the team known for its high-speed, aerobatic demonstrations, Lt. Cmdr. Garrett Kasper said.

The squadron decided not to participate in a weekend air show in Vidalia, Ga., and will skip practice Tuesday, the Pensacola News Journal reported Monday.

Family members were waiting at Pensacola Naval Air Station for the team when it returned from South Carolina late Sunday.

“It was a very teary-eyed reunion,” Kasper told the newspaper.

Davis’ parking space at the base was made into a makeshift memorial with flowers and posters laid nearby.

One poster read: “We will always remember No. 6.” A small note said: “God bless your soul. Fly high Blue Angel.”

Earlier, at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina, the site of the crash, a somber crowd watched as six jets flew overhead in formation. Smoke streamed behind one of the propeller-driven SNJ-2s as it peeled away from the others to complete the “missing man formation,” the traditional salute for a lost military aviator.

“The spirit of the pilot is in the arms of a loving God,” said Rob Reider, a minister who was the announcer for the air show.

The crash happened as the team was performing its final maneuver. The team’s six pilots were joining from behind the crowd of thousands to form a triangle shape known as a delta, but Davis’ jet did not join the formation.

Moments later, his jet crashed just outside Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, hitting homes in a neighborhood about 35 miles northwest of Hilton Head Island, S.C.

Debris — some of it on fire — rained on homes. Eight people on the ground were injured, and some homes were damaged.

Davis, a decorated pilot who joined the Blue Angels in 2005, had previously served as a narrator for the air shows, Reider said. He also handled celebrity flights, and flew with stars such as singer Kelly Clarkson, actor James Franco and University of Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops.

The squadron’s six, F/A-18 Hornets routinely streak low over crowds of thousands at supersonic speeds, coming within feet, sometimes inches, of each other. The pilots, among the Navy’s most elite, are so thoroughly trained and their routines so practiced that deadly crashes are rare; the last one happened in 1999.

The Navy said it could be up to three weeks before it announces what may have caused the crash.

Retired Rear Adm. Ernie Christensen, a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War who flew with the Blue Angels and later commanded the Navy’s Top Gun fighter school in California, said he did not want to speculate about what could have caused the crash. But he said the intense flying leaves no room for human or mechanical error.

“When you are working at high speeds, close to the ground and in close proximity to other aircraft, the environment is extremely unforgiving. That is the reason they practice so many thousands of times,” Christensen said.

The last fatal Blue Angel crash was in 1999, when a pilot and crewmate died while practicing for air shows with the five other Blue Angels jets at a base in Georgia. Saturday’s crash was the 26th fatality in the team’s 60-year history.

Related reading:

Pilot had long been fascinated with flying

Blue Angels pilot killed in air show crash