A U.S. military Osprey aircraft crashed into the sea near the small southern Japanese island of Yakushima with eight people on board on Wednesday, killing at least one crew member, a U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News. A Japanese Coast Guard official told CBS News that one crew member was recovered dead and search operations for the Osprey’s other crew members continued into the night.
The official told CBS News that two helicopters and six boats were involved in the search. The U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command said in a statement that the Osprey was conducting a routine training mission.
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Coast guard spokesman Kazuo Ogawa was previously quoted by Agence France-Presse news agency as saying a distress call had been received from a fishing boat to report the crash. He said there were eight people aboard the Osprey, a number the Coast Guard later revised to six, before the U.S. defense official said there were eight airmen on board.
In this Nov. 29, 2023 Japan Coast Guard handout photo, debris believed to be from a U.S. Air Force Osprey aircraft that crashed into the sea off Japan’s Yakushima island is seen. Japan Coast Guard/Handout via Portal
Japanese state broadcaster NHK broadcast video from a helicopter showing a coast guard ship on the scene, with a bright orange inflatable life raft visible on the water, but with no one inside.
NHK said an eyewitness reported that the plane’s left engine burned before it crashed off the east coast of Yakushima, about 600 miles southwest of Tokyo.
The Kagoshima regional government later said the Osprey flew alongside another plane of the same type that landed safely on Yakushima island.
A Japanese Coast Guard ship and a helicopter conduct search and rescue operations at the site where a U.S. military MV-22 Osprey aircraft crashed into the sea off Yakushima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, Nov. 29, 2023, in a photo from Kyodo. Kyodo via Portal
Japanese newspaper Kyodo News quoted coast guard officials as saying the first distress call came in around 2:45 p.m. local time (12:45 a.m. Eastern time), and that the Japanese Defense Ministry reported that the Osprey disappeared from radar screens about five minutes earlier be.
An Osprey can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but then change the angle of its twin rotors to fly in the air as a turboprop aircraft.
A U.S. Air Force Bell Boeing V22 Osprey flies in front of the air traffic control tower at Yokota Air Base during the 47th Japanese-American Friendship Festival in Fussa, Japan, May 20, 2023. Damon Coulter/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
The Japanese government last year approved a new $8.6 billion support budget over five years to cover the cost of stationing American troops in the country as a deterrent in the face of increasing threats from China, North Korea and Russia.
The Osprey involved in the crash was assigned to Yokota Air Force Base outside Tokyo, Air Force Special Operations Command said. NHK reported that the plane took off Wednesday from a smaller U.S. air station in Iwakuni to fly to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, part of the same island chain as the tiny island of Yakushima. The small island is located south of Kagushima Prefecture on Japan’s most important southern island, Kyushu.
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The US military’s Kadena Air Base is the most important and largest American base in the region.
There have been a number of fatal U.S. Osprey crashes in recent years, most recently a plane crashing during a multinational exercise on an Australian island in August, killing three U.S. Marines and hospitalizing eight others. All five U.S. Marines aboard another Osprey died last summer when the plane crashed in the California desert.
An Osprey crashed in shallow water just off the Japanese island of Okinawa in 2016, but all U.S. Marines on board survived the incident.
Elizabeth Palmer and Lucy Craft at CBS News in Tokyo and Eleanor Watson at the Pentagon contributed to this report.
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