Pilot: Has there been a report of an airplane crash?
Dispatch: I have not seen any, um, come up yet…
After ejecting from a military jet at 2,000 feet on Sunday, the plane’s pilot arrived at a random house to request assistance and call 911. In the recently-released audio of the 911 call, you can hear the homeowner begin to convey the situation to dispatch before the pilot takes over to attempt to explain the bigger issue. While the pilot’s back hurt, he was clearly more concerned with the fact that a 32,000-pound jet-propelled projectile was either headed toward the ground or had already found purchase there. He wanted to make sure emergency protocols were initiated for the plane crash, whether present or future.
The 911 dispatch continued asking the pilot about his own personal injuries and how far he’d fallen from, as though it were a slip-and-fall accident. Obviously, they have a specific script with specific inputs that they need to run through to give the paramedics as much information beforehand as possible, but in this once-in-a-lifetime event they didn’t so much as deviate from the script in light of the unique situation in front of them. You can hear the annoyance in the pilot’s voice grow as the conversation continues.
Thankfully, the pilot was largely unhurt from his ejection near Charleston, South Carolina, and the plane crashed in a mostly empty area of forest about two hours drive northeast. The $100 million Lockheed-Martin jet basically disintegrated on impact. It is not yet clear what caused the pilot to eject from the plane, but in the 911 call he describes it as simply “an aircraft failure.”