Mar. 17—EGLIN AFB — The pilot of an F-22 Raptor fighter jet involved in a Monday "in-flight emergency" that left his aircraft with an apparently collapsed nose gear on an Eglin Air Force Base runway was treated and released from a local hospital after sustaining minor injuries, according to the Tyndall Air Force Base public affairs office.
That was all of the new information on the incident to come from Tyndall AFB almost 24 hours after the F-22 from the Tyndall-headquartered 325th Fighter Wing wound up crippled on the Eglin runway on Monday afternoon. An F-22 squadron from the Tyndall-based wing has been flying out of Eglin AFB since shortly after Hurricane Michael, the Category 5 storm that all but destroyed the Panama City-located Tyndall AFB in 2018.
Emergency vehicles responded to the scene on Monday, and initial reports indicated that the pilot was taken to Eglin's flight medicine facility. A Tyndall public affairs staff member wasn't clear Tuesday on whether the pilot received all of his treatment at Eglin, or was transferred to a medical facility outside the base for some treatment.
The Tyndall AFB public affairs office on Tuesday did not provide any specific information on the pilot's injuries.
A Monday news release from Tyndall AFB, also routed through Eglin AFB, indicated that an "investigation into the circumstances surrounding the mishap is underway."
Routinely, those investigations will comprise probes by two separate Air Force-appointed boards, a safety investigation board and an accident investigation board.
The safety investigation board, the first to begin work, collects evidence designed to develop an understanding of what happened in an incident, with an eye toward preventing similar mishaps in the future. Safety investigation board reports are not released to the public.
The accident investigation board, comprising experts from a variety of disciplines, from medical experts to piloting experts to mechanical and technical experts, is convened to attempt to determine a specific cause of an incident.
An accident investigation board routinely produces a lengthy report, which is releasable to the public, that provides an exhaustive look at the investigated incident. That level of detail can take some time to achieve, however, and it can take months, or sometimes years, for an accident investigation board report to be completed and released.
A case in point is the May 15, 2020, crash of an F-22, also belonging to the 325th Fighter Wing, that went down on the Eglin AFB reservation at about 9:15 a.m. approximately 12 miles northeast of the main section of the base. The crash, in which the pilot was able to safely eject from the jet, occurred during what the Air Force subsequently called a routine training mission.
As of Tuesday, no accident investigation board report had been posted on the Air Force Judge Advocate General website, afjag.af.mil, from which accident investigation board reports are made available to the public.
A previous incident involving an F-22 Raptor assigned to Tyndall AFB came in May of 2012, when a pilot performing "touch-and-go" landings, in which an aircraft rolls down the runway after landing and takes off again, failed to increase power to the engines before retracting the landing gear.
The F-22 skidded along a Tyndall AFB runway, resulting in millions of dollars in damage to the jet. The pilot sustained only minor injuries, according to an Air Education and Training Command report issued six months after the incident.
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