Five days after a US Army Osprey crashed off the coast of southwestern Japan, human “remains” and “debris” from the aircraft were discovered at sea on Monday, December 4, the US Air Force said in a statement .
Also read: An American military plane with six people on board crashes at sea in Japan
While seven crew members on board are still missing, joint search operations by the US and Japan are “currently underway.”[e]s to recover the remains,” the text says, adding that “the identities have not been determined at this time.” The plane crashed on Wednesday, November 29, with eight people on board near the Japanese island of Yakushima during a training mission at sea.
On the day of the accident, 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 an airplane, was found. The US Air Force had identified it as that of 24-year-old Sergeant Jacob Galliher.
The causes of the accident are still unknown
The causes of the accident remain unknown. An emergency management official told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday that shortly before the plane disappeared, local police “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 died in an accident involving such a device in northern Australia, and in 2022 four more died in Norway when their Osprey crashed during NATO exercises. An American ship 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, southwestern United States. After this latest accident, Japan suspended the flights of its fourteen Osprey fleet and asked the American army to do the same on Japanese territory as a precaution.