Some people won’t be at the squadron party next year - who signed off on having TWO Growlers playing at an airshow?
These are very scarce, very valuable resources - certainly not anything to risk on air show shennanigans.
Yep I just heard these weren’t run of the mill every day F-18s, they were the radar jamming EA-18G Growlers.
That tells me that they were in service at the squadron level.
$67,000,000 x2 down the drain.
The Growler is the electronic warfare variant of the F/A-18F Super Hornet. The "EA" prefix stands for Electronic Attack, distinguishing it from the F/A (Fighter/Attack) designation of its base airframe. The EA-18G Growler is a critical and relatively rare asset — the Navy has a limited fleet of them, and they're irreplaceable in terms of the electronic warfare mission. Losing two in a peacetime airshow demonstration is a significant blow.
The VAQ-129 is actually the Fleet Replacement Squadron — the training squadron that teaches crews how to fly and operate Growlers. So these weren't just any airshow performers; they were from the unit responsible for producing the Navy's entire pipeline of Growler crews, which makes the loss of the airframes even more consequential.
Formation flying and close-proximity maneuvers at low altitude are inherently high-risk, and when you're doing them with a platform that has a small fleet size and a specialized mission, the calculus looks different than it does with, say, an F-16 from a Viper demo team flying solo.
My son and I visited the Mojave Space Port in 2016 and were lucky enough to have an EA-18G Growler pilot give us a tour of his aircraft and let us sit in it. My son got the front seat, I got the back seat. The pilots were on a "training" mission flying to Denver to have lunch with the pilot's father!