The 47-year-old pilot of the jet that went down off Kewalo Basin earlier this week is already walking around his hospital room despite having fractured his spine in the crash.

Matt Pothier, of Ewa Beach, said he woke up this morning largely without any pain after undergoing surgery Thursday to fuse vertebrae in his back.

Pothier was flying a Hawker Hunter at about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday when he bailed from the aircraft about 2 miles south of Kewalo Basin. The plane crashed into the water and no one else was hurt.

“I remember it was a beautiful day,” Pothier told reporters today in his room at the Queen’s Medical Center. “My airplane didn’t want to fly anymore, then I remember being wet for a little while.”

Pothier, a contracted pilot who works for Airborne Tactical Advantage Co., or ATAC, was flying as part of the Hawaii Air National Guard’s “Sentry Aloha” fighter training exercise. Shortly after taking off from the airport in Honolulu, he said, he began experiencing trouble and turned around, hoping to make it back to the runway, but had to eject when the plane started going down.

A former Navy pilot, Pothier said it was the first time he ever ejecting from an aircraft. He said Hawker Hunters, first flown in 1951, don’t have advanced technology that ease the pilot’s acceleration out of the cockpit during an ejection. Instead, the sudden force that Pothier experienced may have caused his injuries.

Pothier said he never blacked out and recalled every moment from seeing the canopy fly off to daylight coming in to landing in the water where good Samaritan Mack Ladner came to his aid.

Ladner, a crew member with X-treme Parasail, jumped out of a boat that was nearby and helped free Pothier from his parachute in the water.

“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?’”