Pilot recounts ditching fighter jet off Kewalo Basin

Matt Pothier was standing and lifting his knees in his hospital room Saturday, just three days after having to eject from a fighter jet that crashed into the ocean off Oahu.

“I’m feeling wonderfully, surprisedly better,” he said, recalling he was in a great deal of pain after surgery to fuse bones in two vertebrae that were crushed in the incident. “I woke up this morning at about 5 a.m. and the pain was mostly gone.”

Pothier, 47, spoke to reporters Saturday at The Queen’s Medical Center for the first time since his Hawker Hunter jet crashed about 2 miles south of Kewalo Basin Wednesday afternoon.

He wore a body brace and smiled broadly while talking about the episode and his recovery. He underwent surgery Thursday and his doctor told him he should be able to lose the brace in about a month and will make a full recovery.

Pothier, a Boston native who lives in Ewa Beach, said he looks forward to getting back to flying, surfing, playing hockey and hanging out with his wife Carri and two daughters, Katie, 18, and Abby, 15.

A former Navy pilot, Pothier was a contract pilot with Airborne Tactical Advantage Co., or ATAC, flying in the Hawaii Air National Guard’s “Sentry Aloha” fighter training exercise when something went wrong with his aircraft.

He had just taken off and was going to join up with the lead aircraft when the problem arose and he turned back to try to get to the runway. When Pothier realized he lacked the airspeed or altitude to make it, he began looking for a safe place to ditch his plane.

“There’s buildings over there, boats right there, that looks pretty open,” he recalled. “I just kept on flying until I didn’t really have any more options left and pulled the ejection handle.”

He may have been injured exiting the plane, since Hawker Hunters, which were built starting in the 1950s, aren’t equipped with technology to gradually accelerate a pilot out of the cockpit during ejection, such as in the newer F-18s Pothier flew in the Navy.

The pilot said he didn’t black out and remembers the entire chain of events, from the canopy coming off the aircraft to parachuting into the water a couple hundred feet below.

Shortly afterward, Mack Ladner, a crew member with X-treme Parasail, who was in the area with a boatload of customers, jumped in the water and helped free Pothier from his parachute before it could fill up with water and drag him below.

“You can’t ask for a better, more qualified person to be right there in an ejection scenario,” Pothier said. “I land in the water, I’m in a little pain and Mack comes up and he’s like, ‘Hey, you alright dude?’”

Pothier said he met Mack again Friday and gave him one of his flight patches in gratitude.

The Coast Guard picked up Pothier and brought him to shore. Although transported to the hospital with serious injuries, he was able to call his wife to let her know he was OK.

Carri Pothier said Saturday that she was relieved to hear the news firsthand from her husband and notified their family. But as a former nurse, she was concerned about the extent of any internal injuries.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash and Pothier said the findings may help prevent similar incidents from happening.

Pothier said it wasn’t as scary as getting shot while flying in combat, and that his wife experienced even worse when he deployed to the war in Iraq only hours after she gave birth to their youngest daughter.

“It’s a challenge to be married to a fighter pilot because things happen in our business,” he said.