A vintage Hawker Hunter jet just turned a California parking lot into a very expensive game of bumper cars, and honestly, the footage looks like a Michael Bay movie that ran out of budget for explosions.
The Cold War-era fighter went down near a freeway in the Los Angeles area, clipping vehicles and scattering debris across the asphalt.
Miraculously, the pilot ejected and survived, which is the kind of plot armor usually reserved for the main character.
Several cars were not so lucky, and now a bunch of people are filing insurance claims they never imagined they'd need.
For the non-aviation nerds in the chat: the Hawker Hunter is a British single-seat fighter from the 1950s, the same jet that once broke the sound barrier in a dive and served in air forces all over the world.
It's basically the aviation equivalent of a classic muscle car—beloved, loud, and increasingly flown by guys who really want you to know they own one.
These jets show up at airshows and civilian demo teams because nothing says "look at me" like piloting a 70-year-old war machine over a suburban freeway.
Now, the internet being the internet, the discourse kicked off immediately.
Half of X was posting "he's fine, the jet's fine, everything's fine" memes while the other half demanded to know why a museum piece was doing acrobatics above people stuck in rush-hour traffic.
There's a reason most countries retired these birds decades ago, and it's not because they were too cool to keep around.
The real AITA here isn't the pilot—ejecting was the right call, and he walked away, which is a win by any reasonable standard.
The villain of this story is the broader culture of letting wealthy hobbyists fly aging military hardware over populated areas and calling it "heritage aviation." If your weekend hobby can total a minivan from 2,000 feet, maybe your hobby needs a chaperone.
Officials are investigating the cause, and I'm sure the report will land sometime around when gas prices drop back to 2019 levels.
Meanwhile, the people whose cars got pancaked are probably wondering how you even file a claim for "struck by rogue fighter jet" on a standard insurance form.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: we all love watching old planes do cool stuff, right up until one of them lands on a Honda.
The Hawker Hunter is a gorgeous machine with real history, but gorgeous machines with real history also have real failure modes, and the sky above a freeway is not a museum.
Maybe the thrill of a vintage jet demo isn't worth the gamble when the downside is measured in wrecked Civics and shattered nerves.
Final Thoughts
Then again, nobody ever went viral for staying home.