(Tokyo) Searches continued Thursday morning to try to locate seven people missing after the crash of a US Army Osprey at sea the day before in southwest Japan, which left at least one dead.
One of the crew members of this half-plane, half-helicopter transport device was found at sea unconscious and in cardio-respiratory arrest on Wednesday, and his death was confirmed after his transfer to a Japanese hospital.
The US Air Force Special Command said the Osprey CV-22B was carrying eight crew members and was “conducting a routine training mission” from the US Yokota Air Base near Tokyo. .
“The cause of the accident is currently unknown,” he said in a statement Wednesday, adding that emergency personnel “are on site and conducting search and rescue operations.”
Japan has asked the American armed forces to suspend flights of their Ospreys on Japanese territory until their safety “is established”, with the exception of aircraft of this type participating in “search and rescue operations” , Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said on Thursday.
Tokyo is also asking for “the rapid disclosure of information on the circumstances of the accident,” added Mr. Kihara.
The Japanese army has already suspended flights of its own Ospreys, said Japanese government spokesperson Hirokazu Matsuno, while expressing his condolences for the crash.
“Deployed planes and ships”
An emergency management official in the Japanese department of Kagoshima (southwest), off whose coast the aircraft crashed, told AFP on Wednesday that local police had received “a report that an Osprey was spitting flames from its left engine” and lost a lot of altitude near the island of Yakushima.
Photographs released by the Japanese coast guard agency showed what looked like an overturned yellow lifeboat and other debris floating on the surface of the water.
A coast guard spokesperson told AFP on Thursday that search operations had continued throughout the night and that “planes and ships were deployed”. This agency once mentioned six crew members on board instead of eight.
PHOTO PHILIP FONG, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
An Osprey CV-22
The Osprey, resulting from a cooperation between the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing and the helicopter specialist Bell, is equipped with tilting rotors allowing it to take off and land vertically like a helicopter and to fly like an airplane.
Numerous accidents
The reliability of this hybrid machine has been debated for a long time due to numerous fatal accidents.
At the end of August, three US Marines were killed and five people seriously injured in the accident of an Osprey in northern Australia while the aircraft was participating in joint US-Australian military maneuvers.
In 2022, four US Marines also lost their lives in Norway when their Osprey crashed during NATO exercises.
An American vehicle of the same type also crashed at sea in 2017 after hitting the back of a ship as part of American-Australian military exercises, killing three people.
And in April 2000, 19 Marines were killed when an Osprey crashed in Arizona (southwest United States).
The U.S. military has some 54,000 troops in Japan, a majority of whom are based in the southern archipelago of Okinawa.
Various incidents and accidents involving US military aircraft in Japan have already occurred in the past, including Ospreys, which due to their recurring safety problems are viewed negatively by the Japanese population, and especially in Okinawa.
In 2016, the emergency landing of an Osprey off the coast of Okinawa, an incident which did not cause any casualties, forced American forces for a few days to suspend flights of these aircraft in Japan due to strong local protests.