A retired Russian fighter jet crashed in flight on Sunday afternoon during Yankee Air Museum’s Thunder over Michigan air show at the Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti, while several spectators were in attendance.
The two people aboard the fighter were able to successfully eject before the jet crashed around 4pm, bursting into a fireball, flying right by an apartment building adjacent to Interstate 94 in Van Buren Township without injuring anyone.
According to CBS News, emergency crews rushed to the scene to extinguish the flames.
The two-day show was celebrating its 25th anniversary, and Sunday was the last day.
One of the spectatorsof the show, said: "Like, did we just watch that happen? I was sitting over on Beck Road watching the plane fly out toward (I-)94 when it kept getting lower and lower.
"Then my wife and I saw the black smoke so we drove down to see the crash on 94 and it landed right next to the apartment building."
While the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating what malfunction led the two aboard to eject and the jet to crash, the plane, a Russian MiG-23 aircraft, was doing aerial maneuvers to entertain the spectators.
Additionally, videos taken by spectators appeared to show an explosion before the two people in the jet ejected.
"The pilot and backseater successfully ejected from the aircraft before the crash," Randy Wimbley, a spokesman for the Wayne County Airport Authority said. "While it did not appear they sustained any significant injuries, first responders transported the pair to a nearby hospital as a precaution."
According to Wimbley, the planecrashed into the parking lot at the Waverly on the Lake Apartments on Denton Road at the I-94 service drive, striking unoccupied vehicles, but "no one at the apartment complex nor the air show was injured."
Sunday's crash comes after two fatal ones that occurred last month.
An air show was underway in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when a helicopter and a gyrocopter collided in midair, leaving two dead and two injured.
Additionally, two others died earlier in the day when a single-engine plane went into nearby Lake Winnebago.
On Sunday, witnesses described a loud boom and then plumes of dark smoke rising south of the airport.