sounds like the one I'm thinking of. I'm pretty sure it was an F14 and I know the incident I'm thinking of was Nashville. Being an F14 it would have had both a pilot and a RIO (radio / intercept officer, I think) and checking the web, it looks like they both died.
I did a Google search on "+f14 +nashville +crash" and came up with a couple of hits. One article confirmed that pilot error finding, though it doesn't metion the "showing off for the folks" that I remember from the time. The other just gives the basic info from the crash itself. That hit was at:
http://www.tomcattersassociation.org/F14/f14-news.htm
What stunned me was that I thought this was only a couple of years ago. This was January of 1996!!
Millington still has military planes fly in and out, but not near what they used to. The Naval air station has been closed (no longer training plane mechanics) and the majority of the base has been turned over to the city. There is still a military area, but its a clerical office. The airfield gets used for some military tasks (combat air patrol sometimes is based there during high alerts) but is supposed to be mostly civilian now. Just a couple of weeks ago, however, they had a big air show, including the Blue Angels. I didn't get to go, but friends who went said they had a larger presence of more different active military aircraft than they had seen in a long time.
Time flies, don't it. The initial news report said that his parents were at the airport/air field watching him take off. So he probably wanted to do something special for them and it went horribly wrong. A retroactive Hold muh beer! alert.