A U.S. Army helicopter with five crew members aboard went down Tuesday night in the ocean two miles off the Hawaiian island of Oahu, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Debris was spotted in the water by both the Coast Guard and Army, and aircraft were searching the area for the missing crew with no update on their location by mid-morning Wednesday.
The Coast Guard said it received a call at about 10 p.m. from Wheeler Army Airfield that personnel lost communications with the Black Hawk, which was conducting night training with another Army helicopter along the island’s northwestern coast.
A Coast Guard HC-130 search-and-rescue airplane, helicopter, cutter and response boat were dispatched to search for the soldiers, along with another Army Black Hawk, a Marine Corps helicopter and the Honolulu Fire Department’s shore patrol.
The lost helicopter is part of ]the Army’s 25th Infantry Division combat aviation brigade, which is based at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, said Dennis Drake, a spokesman for U.S. Army Hawaii.
Efforts to find the crew had gone on through the night and sunrise was expected to help with the search, Drake said.
The Army has had 22 Class A flight accidents since October, which involve either the loss of an aircraft or the death of a crew member, according to safety statistics published by the service. That number has surpassed the previous year’s total of 20.
A soldier was killed in April when a Black Hawk from Fort Belvoir, Va., crashed on a Maryland country club golf course.
On Aug. 5, a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey with 26 aboard crashed off the coast of Australia during a training mission, killing three Marines, and a Marine KC-130 tanker aircraft crashed into a Mississippi field in July, killing 15 Marines and a Navy corpsman. The Marine Corps has since directed all of its aviation units to conduct a 24-hour safety standdown to go over procedures.
