SMYRNA, Tenn.—A Blue Angels F/A-18 fighter jet crashed Thursday near
Nashville, Tennessee, killing the pilot just days before a weekend air
show performance, officials said.
A U.S. official said the pilot was Marine Capt. Jeff Kuss. The
official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on
condition of anonymity. According to his official Blue Angels biography,
Kuss joined the elite aerobatics team in 2014 and accumulated more than
1,400 flight hours.
Harry Gill, the town manager in Smyrna just outside Nashville, said
Thursday that the pilot was the only casualty and no civilians on the
ground were hurt.
The Navy said in a news release that the pilot was beginning to take
off during an afternoon practice session when the crash happened. Five
other F/A-18 jets landed safely moments after the crash.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of the
Blue Angels after this tragic loss. I know that the Navy and Marine
Corps Team is with me. We will investigate this accident fully and do
all we can to prevent similar incidents in the future,” Adm. John
Richardson, the Navy’s top officer, said in a Facebook post.
The Blue Angels will not participate in the weekend air show, the Navy said in a news release.
It was the second fighter jet crash of the day for the military’s
elite fighter jet performance teams. A member of the U.S. Air Force
Thunderbirds crashed in Colorado after a flyover for the Air Force
Academy graduation where President Barack Obama spoke. That pilot
ejected safely into a field.
Kuss was a native of Durango, Colorado, and was commissioned as a
second lieutenant in the Marines in 2006. He had previously served in
Afghanistan before joining the Blue Angels.
“It’s hard to put into words right now, but it’s beautiful that a
person can live and die engaged in their life’s pursuits,” said his
grandfather, Dolph Kuss, reached at his home in Durango. “This was his
dream since he was a child, to be an aviator, a flier.”
He choked back tears and said he was struggling to gather his thoughts.
“It’s hard to celebrate someone’s life in this way,” he said. “It is
certainly a shock. Everything in life has its dangers, I guess.”
Kuss was married with two young children, his grandfather said.
In Smyrna, retired teacher Brenda Lewis and her 21-year-old grandson
had spent much of the day in her backyard near the airport watching the
Blue Angels fly overhead.
She’s seen them many times before.
“But this afternoon, something made me really want to watch them,”
she said. “They looked like they were having such a good time playing up
there.”
She went inside to bake a chocolate pie when she heard a loud boom.
She didn’t think too much of it at first because the airport is just on
the other side of her tree line and she’s used to loud noises.
Then she heard sirens and went around the corner. She saw the smoke
rising and police cars arriving. She went inside because she didn’t want
to see any more.
“I’m always so fascinated by them, the anticipation of it all,” she
said of their airshow. “Then something tragic like this happens. My
heart is just broken.”
Phil Dennis, a manager at Auto Masters of Smyrna nearby, was standing
on the business’s back deck with another employee watching the planes
practice above.
“I’m still shaken up about it,” he said, hours after watching the plane go down.
Dennis watched one plane coming out of a loop that looked like it was
flying too fast toward the ground. It disappeared behind a tree line,
and he said his heart stopped. He said he could hear the engines
roaring; then all he heard was silence.
“I was so worried. I thought maybe he’d have time to recover,” Dennis said. “But he didn’t.”
A massive fireball erupted from behind the trees.
“I felt it down my spine,” he said. “It shocked me; I paused for a
minute and questioned whether it really happened. I thought it can’t be
real.”
Thomas Bucher, 32, of Smyrna, lives about 2,000 feet from the crash
site and was outside doing yard work Thursday afternoon. He had noticed
the jets practicing near the airport.
“That particular Blue Angel, I saw him doing some barrel rolls looked
like in the air,” he said “He was flying awful low, I thought, and he
kind of got below the tree line over there. And it looked like he was on
his belly going down, and that’s the end of it.”
After the plane went below the tree line, Bucher said he saw a cloud of smoke come up over the tree line.
“I was hoping that he had ejected from his seat, but with him being
that low … My dad is in aviation; I knew there was no way he could have
ejected from that height and survived.”
He said he thinks the air show on Saturday and Sunday where the Blue Angels were scheduled to appear should go on as planned.
“Maybe have a moment of silence for him and for what happened, but I think they should go on with it.”
Bucher said it was not raining when the plane crashed but there was a short rainstorm about 10 minutes after the crash.
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