Tokyo, November 29, 2023, The Europe Today: A US Osprey military aircraft with eight people on board crashed on Wednesday off the coast of Japan, the coastguard said.
The aircraft has something of a troubled history, with several fatal crashes over the years.
Officials had received an emergency call from a fishing boat near the crash site. It was not immediately clear which US base the Osprey belonged to, although it was believed to be heading from the Iwakuni US base in the Yamaguchi region to the Kadena base in Okinawa.
Details about what happened to the aircraft were not immediately known, the coastguard said.
“We received information at 2:47 p.m. (0547 GMT/UTC) today that the US military’s Osprey crashed off Yakushima Island,” a spokeswoman told the AFP news agency.
The Osprey is a tiltrotor aircraft that combines the vertical takeoff, hovering and landing capabilities of a helicopter with the long-range, fuel efficiency and speed characteristics of a turboprop aircraft.
It has been deployed in transportation and medical evacuation operations over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Kuwait.
Yakushima lies south of Japan’s southernmost main island Kyushu.
