Title: How low can a fighter jet fly safely? - Quora
Headings: How low can a fighter jet fly safely?
How low can a fighter jet fly safely?
Scot Johnson

Content: These were done at 500 feet/152 meters and as I recall at 360kts/667km/h. ( We had a waiver for flying over 250kts below 10,000) However in training for combat, in between combat line periods in Southeast Asia, we practiced more incredibly low and incredibly fast flights over water. More than anything else, unseen obstacles are the greatest threat to low level flying safety. At 500 feet and being on the planned and authorized canned routes flown by many others, obstacles were not too much of a problem. These planned routes avoided them. However other aircraft were sometimes a problem, mostly light civil aircraft. I also do remember one time I dropped down from 500 feet to perhaps 200 feet over the flat desert, only to have an F-111 fly perpendicular and underneath me at an even lower attitude. We flew a lot out of the Philippines. There the main problem was the unseen obstacles of logging cables, stretched across a valley from one mountain to another. We had one aircraft have part of his wing sliced off by one of these cables as he flew a low-level through a valley.