Recently released police bodycam footage shows the stunning moment law enforcement officers in Washington state rolled up on a blood-streaked Marine pilot who’d only moments earlier safely ejected from a combat jet.
Officers with the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office found Marine Maj. Jackson Simon walking calmly along the road on June 13 shortly after his F/A-18 Hornet crashed into the side of Mount Rainier near Rimrock Lake.
“Hey, sir, how are you?” Simon nonchalantly asked the officers as they made contact with him.
“Good! Are you the only pilot?” one officer replied, prompting Simon to reveal that he was alone.
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Simon later said that he “went through some trees” after “doing circles over the lake” as part of a training routine.
“We were doing circles over the lake, doing some low-level training,” he noted. “And then I tucked in, and I’m not sure exactly, honestly, I’m a little bit frazzled.”
Are you surprised at just how composed the pilot is after crashing his fighter and almost dying?
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According to CBS News, his jet hit a power line as he was “dazzling lakeside spectators, circling with thunderous, low-flying maneuvers.” The subsequent crash spawned “a sizable brush fire that spread across two acres.”
The network stressed that military investigators had “yet to blame the crash on the jet hitting those power lines.”
What was known was that the downed jet was estimated to cost “tens of millions of dollars.:
Newly released video shows the aftermath of a Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet crashing into a mountain in Washington state in June. pic.twitter.com/nJm6ElHip6
— CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews) August 14, 2026
Simon was later seen on police bodycam footage calmly having a phone conversation with a friend.
“Hey, buddy, this is Major Simon, I just crashed,” he said while on the call.
According to Fox News, some of the lakeside bystanders who watched the military exercise called 911 after seeing Simon eject. An incident report showed that the first call came in at 12:18 pm local time.
Local station KING-TV in Seattle also interviewed witnesses.
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In a statement to Fox News, the Marine Corps said the crash was the result of a “non-fatal aviation mishap.”
In a separate statement to the Military Times, the Marine Corps refused to confirm whether the “aviation mishap” was also responsible for the fire.
However, officer bodycam footage showed one of the officers telling someone on the phone that “we got the hillside on fire where the jet landed.”
Task & Purpose notes that this was just one of several “crashes” in recent months.
“Last month, a F-35B from the same Marine Corps unit crashed in Southern California,” according to the outlet. “Other incidents include a B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base that killed three civilians and five airmen, as well as an AH-64 Apache helicopter crash in Texas last week that killed two soldiers.”
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