Stateside Daily Archive26 Jun 2025

Rising from the wreckage: Kegan Gill's Phoenix Revival

For a pilot, ejecting mid-flight is always a bad scenario.

Lt. Kegan "Smurf" Gill narrowly escaped from a fighter jet traveling 695 miles per hour, approaching the speed of sound. It’s the fastest survived ejection in naval aviation history.

“I have a very clear linear memory, right up to the point where I pulled the ejection handle, and after that I have no linear memory,” he said about the experience. “But over the course of the years, I'd gotten a lot back in flashbacks, which were often night terrors. So maybe not the most pleasant way to remember something, but that gave me some insights into what had happened.”

A former Naval fighter pilot, Gill flew a training exercise off the East Coast in 2014 when his F/A-18 ran into trouble. His subsequent injuries, including head trauma, changed his life forever.

Gill wrote about the experience and aftermath in his new book “Phoenix Revival: The Aftermath of Naval Aviation's Fastest Ejection.”

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