Just after noon on June 13, 2026, residents around Rimrock Lake heard the kind of sound that doesn’t belong over a quiet stretch of the Washington Cascades: a fighter jet, low and fast, then a series of sharp pops. Seconds later a U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18D Hornet slammed into a forested hillside, the pilot punched out, and a fireball lit the timber. The aircraft was gone. The pilot, somehow, was not.

The jet went down roughly 55 miles southeast of Seattle, deep in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near Naches, Yakima County. The pilot ejected, was located by sheriff’s deputies, and walked away with minor injuries. The wreck did something a routine training mishap usually doesn’t: it started a wildfire, since named the Pine Tree Fire.

It is a story with three improbable strands — a survivable ejection over rugged terrain, a military jet igniting a forest fire, and an aging Cold War workhorse still flying in an age of stealth. Here is what is confirmed, and what isn’t.

The Ejection Everyone Saw

What made this crash spread online within the hour wasn’t the official statement — it was the phone footage. Bystanders along the lake caught the Hornet’s final moments and, in some clips, the pilot’s parachute against the smoke. A military ejection is violent physics: an explosive charge and rocket motor hurl the seat clear of the airframe in a fraction of a second, the canopy gone, the body subjected to forces that can compress the spine. That the pilot survived it over mountainous terrain, then was walked out by medics, is the good news buried in a bad day.

The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing confirmed the basics quickly and said little else, which is standard while a mishap board is convened.

One detail worth flagging carefully: the F/A-18D is a two-seat jet, but reporting indicates a single pilot was aboard for this training flight. We are attributing that as a report, not a certainty — the Marine Corps has not published a crew manifest, and the investigation will settle it.

A Jet Crash That Started a Forest Fire

Aircraft crashes are usually contained disasters — a wreck field, a recovery operation, a closed road. This one came with a second act. The impact and the fuel-fed explosion set the surrounding timber alight, and the National Interagency Fire Center logged a new blaze: the Pine Tree Fire, reported at roughly two acres before crews moved in. In a dry Cascade summer, a jet full of fuel hitting a forested slope is exactly the ignition source fire managers dread.

Witnesses near the lake described hearing the jet before they understood what they were watching. “A couple of jets had already buzzed over the lake. We heard another one coming, but it made popping sounds,” resident Tina Liniger told KING 5. The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office said simply that a fire had started as a result of the crash and that local fire personnel were on scene.

The terrain itself is part of the story. The mishap occurred along Visual Route 1355 (VR-1355), a low-level training corridor threading the valleys of the Cascades — scenic, demanding, and popular with the Growler squadrons up at NAS Whidbey Island. Flying fast and low through that country is the entire point; it is also unforgiving of any failure.

How They Knew Which Jet It Was

The Marine Corps didn’t name the type or unit at first. The internet did. Aviation trackers identified the airframe as BuNo 165412, tail code WS-415, flying under the callsign SNAKE 21 — an F/A-18D from VMFA-323 “Death Rattlers,” the Miramar-based squadron that had deployed a handful of Hornets up to Boeing Field in Seattle. A Puget Sound photographer reportedly noticed that only three of the four visiting jets came home.

We treat that identification as credible open-source reporting rather than an official confirmation, because 3rd MAW has not formally released the tail number or unit. But it is consistent across multiple aviation outlets and the photographic record of the deployment.

An Old Warrior in a Stealth Age

The F/A-18D is a “Legacy” Hornet — the original Hornet family that first flew in the late 1970s, not the larger Super Hornet. For decades these jets were the backbone of Marine fixed-wing aviation. Today they are the exception. The Marine Corps has been retiring its Legacy Hornets and standing up F-35B and F-35C squadrons, and VMFA-323 itself flew what was billed as the Corps’ last F/A-18 carrier deployment before beginning its own transition. Every remaining Hornet is, in effect, running on borrowed time.

That context matters without becoming the story. A jet’s age does not, by itself, explain a crash — and nobody should read one into this one. The cause is under investigation, full stop. What is fair to say is that operating a shrinking fleet of older airframes hard, on demanding low-level routes, is the daily reality of a force in the middle of a generational handover.

For now the headline is the one that matters most: the jet is a total loss, the forest took a scar, and the pilot is alive to fly again. Investigators will spend months on the rest.

Local and aviation-news coverage of the Rimrock Lake crash and the resulting wildfire.

Sources: The Aviationist; Marine Corps Times; Task & Purpose; CBS News; KING 5; KIRO 7; NBC Right Now; AccuWeather; 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing statement; National Interagency Fire Center.