On February 2nd, 1970, a U.S. Air Force fighter jet flew for eleven minutes with nobody in the cockpit — and landed itself. First Lieutenant Gary Foust was flying a Convair F-106 Delta Dart in a training dogfight over Montana when his aircraft fell into an unrecoverable flat spin. He ejected at 15,000 feet, expecting to watch his jet crash into the mountains below. Instead, the empty aircraft leveled its wings, held its trim, and glided itself down onto a snow-covered wheat field — engine still running, nobody at the controls, nobody steering it. This is the full story of the aircraft the Air Force nicknamed the Cornfield Bomber: the physics that saved it when the pilot couldn’t, the radio call that made it famous, and the Montana sheriff who very nearly became its second unplanned passenger of the day.

Source: The Fighter Jet That Landed Itself — After The Pilot Had Already Ejected