Eight US Marines Remain Hospitalized After Deadly Crash During Training In Australia

Eight US Marines Remain Hospitalized After Deadly Crash During Training In Australia

Micaela Burrow on August 28, 2023

Eight U.S. Marines remain in the hospital after a fiery crash Sunday left three Marines dead and injured 20, five critically, during training exercises off Australia’s northern coast, The Associated Press reported.

Australian emergency responders evacuated the survivors to the hospital 50 miles south in Darwin within hours of the tiltrotor aircraft going down in a fiery crash at around 9:30 a.m. Sunday morning local time, Northern Territory Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said, according to the AP. As of Monday, 12 Marines had been discharged from the Royal Darwin Hospital and one of the critically injured received emergency surgery, she said.

“It’s … a credit to everyone involved that we were able to get 20 patients from an extremely remote location on an island into our tertiary hospital within a matter of hours,” Fyles said, according to the AP.

She declined to provide the condition of the eight remaining Marines out of respect for the Marines and their families.

The Marine Corps has not yet publicly released the names of the three deceased.

Australia set up an exclusion zone around the crash site, which still contains the bodies of the three, Northern Territory Police Commissioner Michael Murphy said, according to the AP. Investigators will piece through evidence on the ground for at least 10 more days as they seek to discover the cause of the crash.

“For a chopper that crashes and catches fire, to have 20 Marines that are surviving, I think that’s an incredible outcome,” Murphy said.

The MV-22B Osprey that crashed was transporting Marines from Darwin to the remote island of Melville as part of Exercise Predator’s Run, a multinational military drill involving the U.S., Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor. All 23 Marines aboard were among the 150 total based in Darwin as part of the U.S. Marine Rotational Forces, according to the AP. Up to 2,500 Marines rotate through the city every year in support of U.S. and Australian efforts to build up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.

The Marine Corps’ Osprey has been involved in five fatal accidents since 2012 resulting in 16 deaths, prompting a drawn-out investigation into the problem. The service has concluded that a built-in mechanical weakness with the Osprey’s clutch contributed to several accidents and close calls, and the service claims to have identified a temporary fix.

It can lift off vertically like a helicopter but tilt its propellers forward in flight to gain much greater velocity like an airplane.

“These Marines served our country with courage and pride, and my thoughts and prayers are with their families today, with the other troops who were injured in the crash, and with the entire USMC family,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement Sunday.