The Air Force admitted losing two of its 184 – make that 182 – top-of-the-line F-22 Raptor stealth fighters on Thursday. It was one of the worst days yet in what’s turning out to be a bad year for the pricey, radar-evading jet built by Lockheed Martin.

At 3:30 local time on Thursday an F-22, apparently belonging to the 325th Wing, a training unit based at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, plunged into the ground in a wooded area inside the base perimeter near Highway 98, sparking a small fire.

The pilot ejected safely. ‘The cause of the crash is still under investigation and additional details will be provided as soon as they become available,” the flying branch said in a statement.

The same day, the Air Force copped to an earlier accident involving the stealth fighter, which costs as much as $678 million per copy (depending on how you crunch the numbers). On May 31, a student pilot on his second solo Raptor flight at Tyndall neglected to power up his jet’s engines fast enough after retracting the landing gear.

‘Without sufficient thrust, the aircraft settled back to the runway, landing on its underside,” the Air Force explained in its […]