Five days after the crash of a US Army Osprey off the coast of southwest Japan, human “remains” and “debris” from the aircraft were discovered at sea on Monday, December 4, announced the US Air Force in a statement.
While seven crew members on board are still missing, searches carried out jointly by the United States and Japan are “currently deployed to recover” the remains, the text specifies, adding that “the identities have not yet been determined at this stage.” The aircraft crashed at sea on Wednesday November 29, with eight people on board, not far from the Japanese island of Yakushima, during a training mission.
The body of a single crew member of the Osprey, an aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter and fly like a plane, was found the same day as the accident. It had been identified by the US Air Force as Sergeant Jacob Galliher, 24.
The causes of the accident still unknown
The causes of the accident remain unknown. An emergency management official told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday that shortly before the disappearance of the aircraft, local police had received “a report that an Osprey was spewing flames from its left engine.” .
The reliability of Ospreys has been debated for several years due to numerous fatal accidents. At the end of August, three American marines were killed in the accident of a device of this type in northern Australia, and, in 2022, four others died in Norway when their Osprey crashed during NATO exercises. An American craft of the same type also crashed at sea in 2017, killing three people. And in April 2000, nineteen Marines were killed when an Osprey crashed in Arizona (southwest United States). After this latest accident, Japan suspended the flights of its fleet of fourteen Ospreys and asked the American army to do the same on Japanese territory, as a precautionary measure.
