SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
US Osprey military aircraft with 8 crew crashes off Japan: coastguard
Tokyo, Nov 29 (AFP) Nov 29, 2023
A US Osprey military aircraft with eight crew on board crashed on Wednesday off the coast of Japan, the coastguard said.

"We received information at 2:47 pm (0547 GMT) today that the US military's Osprey crashed off Yakushima Island," a spokeswoman told AFP.

"We were also notified that there were eight crew members on board," she added. "There is no further information at the moment."

The island of Yakushima lies south of Japan's southernmost main island Kyushu.

Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that the Osprey departed from the Iwakuni US base in the Yamaguchi region headed for the Kadena base in Okinawa.

NHK also cited defence ministry sources as saying that the aircraft was a CV-22 Osprey belonging to the US Yokota air base in Tokyo.

The tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft has a troubled history, with a string of fatal crashes over the years.

In August, a crash in northern Australia killed three US marines among the 23 on board.

The Boeing MV-22B Osprey crashed on Melville Island, north of Darwin during a military exercise for locally based troops.

Eight other US Marines needed hospital treatment including one of them in intensive care.

Four US Marines were killed in Norway last year when their MV-22B Osprey aircraft went down during NATO training exercises.

Three Marines were killed in 2017 when an Osprey crashed after clipping the back of a transport ship while trying to land at sea off Australia's north coast.

And 19 Marines died in 2000 when their Osprey crashed during drills in Arizona.

This month five US service members were killed when a helicopter crashed into the Mediterranean during a training exercise.

Officials did not specify where the aircraft was flying from, but the United States has deployed a carrier strike group to the Mediterranean as part of efforts to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a regional conflict.

There have been multiple other crashes of US military aircraft in recent years, including an F-35 stealth warplane that went down in South Carolina in September, with the pilot able to eject.

In April, three US soldiers were killed and another injured when two helicopters returning from a training mission in a remote area of Alaska collided.

The previous month, two US Army helicopters crashed during a nighttime training mission in Kentucky, killing all nine soldiers on board.


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
EU clears European satellite giant SES bid for US rival Intelsat
Aethero Secures $8.4M to Build the Next Generation of Space-Based Computing and Autonomous Spacecraft
Axiom-4 mission launch scrubbed as SpaceX detects leak in Falcon 9 rocket

24/7 Energy News Coverage
Scientists develop electronic skin to give robots the feeling of human touch
Nairobi startup's bid to be 'operating system for global South'
Russia to build Kazakhstan's first nuclear power plant

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
Hegseth defends $961.6B Defense Department budget request
Iran's nuclear programme, Netanyahu's age-old obsession
Israel, Iran resume missile exchange, threaten more attacks

24/7 News Coverage
Nations advance ocean protection, vow to defend seabed
Greenland ice melted much faster than average in May heatwave: scientists
Value oceans, don't plunder them, French Polynesia leader tells AFP



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.