Tokyo will suspend flights of its Osprey military aircraft after a US armed forces plane crashed near the island of Yakushima, in southern Japan, authorities announced this Thursday.
Taro Yamato, a senior Japanese Defense Ministry official, told a parliamentary hearing that the country intends to suspend Osprey flights for now, but without revealing further details.
At least one person was killed when a US military Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey crashed into the sea, the Japanese Coast Guard announced Wednesday.
The device, capable of performing the functions of a helicopter and an airplane, had a crew of six people, the coast guard said.
According to authorities, the search for survivors continues.
The cause of the accident and the condition of the other crew members are not yet known, said Japanese Coast Guard spokesman Kazuo Ogawa.
Ogawa said the coast guard received an alert at 2:47 p.m. (6:47 a.m. in Lisbon) on Wednesday from a fishing boat about the incident, which occurred near Yakushima, an island off Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture.
Coast guard aircraft and patrol boats found one crew member, who was later pronounced dead by a doctor, the spokesman said.
Rescue operations also found debris believed to have come from the plane and an empty lifeboat about a kilometer off the east coast of Yakushima, Ogawa added.
The aircraft had taken off from the US base in Iwakuni, in Yamaguchi prefecture, and was heading to the Kadena base, in the Okinawa archipelago, where most of the US military installations in Japan are located.
Denny Tamaki, governor of Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan are located, told reporters Wednesday that he would call for the suspension of all Osprey flights except those searching for crash victims.
The Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey was manufactured by American aircraft builder Boeing and helicopter specialist Bell.
The Osprey has long been the subject of debate due to a series of fatal accidents involving this type of aircraft, the most recent occurring in late August in which three US Marines died in northern Australia.
Source: TSF
