A U.S. military F-16 fighter jet crashed in Grand Traverse County, Mich., Thursday afternoon with the pilot ejecting, the Michigan State Police reported. “We have a possible mayday by wingman. I believe (they) may have taken a bird,” a military pilot alerted air traffic controllers, according to audio captured by LiveATC.net. Video showed a fireball in a field next to homes and a large smoke plume in the rural community south of Traverse City. “It appears that they may have lost an engine and ejected… but we do see a lot of black smoke, which we believe is the ejected F-16,” an air traffic controller relayed to other pilots. The pilot was the only person onboard the plane and ejected before the crash. No one else was injured, and the pilot is in stable condition at a local hospital, according to state police. The plane was participating in training exercises at a National Guard Base in Alpena, Mich., according to The Associated Press. Everyone within a one-mile (1.6 kilometre) radius was evacuated due to a “hazardous chemical spill related to the plane crash,” State Police said in a social media post. Shellie Doornbos and her husband were driving home from running errands when they saw the fireball. “We could hear explosions coming from the fire and asked a police officer what it was we were hearing as we were driving away, and he told us it was a fighter jet crash and the explosions were ammunition,” she told CNN. While civilian aircraft accidents are investigated by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. military investigates the causes of its own crashes. While it’s unclear what caused the F-16 to go down, if the bird strike the other pilot reported turns out to be the cause, it would not be unusual. Thousands of planes hit birds and other animals in the United States each year, according to the Federal Aviation Administration Wildlife Strike Database. Forty-one strikes were reported in 2025 in Traverse City, Mich., alone in 2025.
