A Hawker Hunter jet flying adversary-training missions for the U.S. Navy went down in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Morro Bay, California, on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, after its pilot radioed a mayday call reporting a loss of engine thrust. The pilot ejected, was hoisted from open water by a Navy search-and-rescue helicopter crew, and was flown to a hospital in Fresno with no significant injuries. Five days later, the jet itself has not been found.
The aircraft was not Navy property. It belonged to Airborne Tactical Advantage Company, a Textron-owned contractor that flies aging fighter jets out of Naval Air Station Point Mugu to stand in as enemy aircraft during U.S. military training exercises. The pilot who ejected was ATAC’s employee, not a service member, and the jet itself was not a current military design but a 70-year-old British-built fighter leased into a civilian training fleet. The distinction also shaped how quickly the Navy could say what, exactly, had gone down.
ATAC’s red-air jets fly under contract, not under Navy command
The jet was a Hawker Hunter Mk 58 registered N345AX, built in 1956 as Royal Air Force airframe XF947 before spending two decades on the British airshow circuit painted yellow and black as “Miss Demeanour”, an identity aviation writers traced through the jet’s ownership history within a day of the crash. ATAC later acquired the airframe and repainted it for adversary work, one of 22 Hawker Hunters the company operates to simulate enemy fighters for the Navy and Marine Corps. Four of those jets, including the one lost off Morro Bay, were flying in support of a Navy and Marine Corps training mission on Sept. 22.
ATAC has held Navy and Marine Corps adversary-training contracts since the 1990s, and Textron acquired the company in 2016, folding it into a defense-industrial portfolio that already built hardware for the Pentagon. Beyond its Hunters, the contractor’s mixed fleet includes Dassault Mirage F1s, Israeli-built Kfirs and Douglas A-4 Skyhawks, all bought secondhand and flown out of Point Mugu to give Navy and Marine pilots something unfamiliar to fight against in training. The arrangement lets the Navy buy simulated dogfights from a contractor’s aging fleet rather than spend flight hours on its own fighters — a tradeoff that put a civilian pilot in the cockpit of a jet the British air force retired generations ago.
A mayday call, an ejection, and an open-ocean rescue
The pilot ejected using the jet’s Martin-Baker seat and came down in open water about six miles northwest of Morro Bay, where a Navy MH-60S Seahawk crew from Naval Air Station Lemoore’s search-and-rescue squadron pulled him from the ocean within the hour. He was taken to a hospital in Fresno and released the next day.
John Rupp, ATAC’s director of global military sales, described the pilot afterward as being in “great condition, great spirits, and no significant injuries.”
Search crews haven’t found the Hunter five days later
Neither the jet nor identifiable wreckage had turned up as of this week. The U.S. Coast Guard asked boaters in the area to watch for debris or signs of pollution and report anything to its Los Angeles-Long Beach sector, a routine step for a crash site in open water off San Luis Obispo County, a stretch of coastline worked daily by commercial fishing boats and recreational sailors.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board have both opened investigations, and Coast Guard crews searching the accident site had not located the aircraft or visible wreckage as of the Wednesday after the crash. The Navy grounded ATAC’s entire 22-jet fleet while the inquiry proceeds, a standard precaution rather than a finding of fault. Without the airframe in hand, investigators are left piecing together radar data, radio traffic and the pilot’s own account of the engine failure to explain why the thrust disappeared.
The second ATAC engine failure over California waters in a year
This is not the first time an ATAC Hawker Hunter has gone down off California. A similar engine failure sent another ATAC Hunter into the Pacific off Big Sur on Oct. 15, 2025, less than a year before the Morro Bay crash, and both aircraft belong to the same aging airframe family the Navy has leased for adversary training since the 1990s. Neither pilot was killed, but both accidents ended with a jet lost at sea and a fleet grounded for review. Each Hunter now carries a Rolls-Royce Avon turbojet designed in the 1950s, engines that ATAC’s maintenance crews keep running on a fleet built decades before most of the sailors it trains against were born.
Whether the Morro Bay Hunter turns up before the investigation concludes remains an open question. The FAA and NTSB have not set a timetable for their findings, and the Coast Guard’s advisory to mariners — watch for debris, note its location, avoid handling it — is, for now, the only active search still underway for a 70-year-old jet that went down six miles off a California beach town.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
- Card skimmers hidden on gas pumps and ATMs are draining accounts, and here’s the tell
- Doctors warn a silent liver disease now affects one in three American adults
- Hackers are hijacking outdated home routers, and the FBI named the models to check
- Older Teslas are wearing out in ways early owners never saw coming
