Three 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 Marine Corps said in an update Monday evening.
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 Monday morning, according to The Associated Press. As of Monday, 18 Marines had been discharged from the Royal Darwin Hospital; of the remaining two, two were stable and one was in critical condition, the service later said in a statement.
The Marine Corps identified the three deceased as Cpl. Spencer Collart, 21, of Arlington, Virginia; Capt. Eleanor V. LeBeau, 29, of Belleville, Illinois; and Maj. Tobin J. Lewis, 37, of Jefferson, Colorado. (RELATED: Pentagon Did Not Force Family Of Fallen Marine To Foot The Bill For Flight To Arlington Cemetery)
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of three respected and beloved members of the [Marine Rotational Force-Darwin] family,” Col. Brendan Sullivan, their commanding officer, said in the statement. “Our thoughts and prayers remain with the families and with all involved.”
One of the five critically injured Marines received emergency surgery, Fyles said, according to the AP.
“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.
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.
This picture shows a general view of the Emergency & Trauma Center of the Royal Darwin Hospital in Darwin on August 27, 2023, as rescue work in progress to transport those injured in the US Osprey military aircraft crash at a remote island north of Australia’s mainland. (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated.
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