In 1992, America's Super Top Secret Stealth Fighter Fell from the Sky

Joseph Trevithick

Security,

The day the F-117 crashed. 

Sitting in her trailer home fewer than 20 miles from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Carolyn Massy didn’t think much of it when she heard a military jet fly overhead. But on the hot summer night of Aug. 4, 1992, she heard one loud bang — and then another.

“My husband and sister were out there in the yard looking at the fire,” Massy later toldU.S. Air Force investigators, according to an official transcript. “My husband looked up and said, oh my gosh, there’s the pilot — he was floating right across the trailer.”

As her husband helped the aviator, Massy dialed 9–1–1. Grateful for the help and with a small laceration on his chin, the slightly shaken Air Force captain John Mills quickly called his unit at Holloman.
“After it happened, he was out in the yard looking at the crash, when he grew more upset,” Massy noted. “I thought he did very well under the circumstances.”

What she probably didn’t know at the time was that their unexpected guest had just bailed out of one of the Air Force’s super-secret F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters. Four years earlier, the Pentagon was still denying the black planes even existed.

Massy’s recollections, along with statements from Mills, other Air Force officials, local authorities and additional witnesses are all in the official accident investigation. In 2014, the flying branch put a copy of the record on its Freedom of Information Act website.

The report describes the kind of response you can expect if a secretive military aircraft comes down in your backyard. While the Pentagon revealed the Nighthawk to the public in 1988, the Air Force was very guarded about the jets for some time afterward.

Massy’s recollections, along with statements from Mills, other Air Force officials, local authorities and additional witnesses are all in the official accident investigation. In 2014, the flying branch put a copy of the record on its Freedom of Information Act website.