17 Marines Feared Dead in Copter Crash

A U.S. military helicopter with 17 people on board plunged into the ocean off southern Japan today, and a search by ships and planes failed to find survivors, a U.S. military official said.

Capt. Dan Trout, spokesman at the U.S. Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, said it is believed that all 17 aboard the CH-53D helicopter were U.S. Marines.

The downed copter was returning to the Marine base at Futemma, Okinawa, from Iwakuni, another Marine installation in southwest Japan, Trout said.

The Japanese Maritime Safety Agency reported that the helicopter crashed at 12:50 p.m.

Yukio Kai, a spokesman at maritime safety headquarters in Kagoshima, southern Japan, said a search boat had recovered what might be a part of the chopper about six miles south of the reported crash site, 15 miles south of the Japanese island of Yakushima.

Orange Object Found

He said an agency patrol plane had also sighted an orange-colored object in the water, which he said might be a rubber boat.

Two safety agency boats were in the area and three more were heading toward the search site, he said. Yakushima is about 80 miles south of Kagoshima, at the southern end of the main Japanese island of Kyushu.

Lt. Gary Shrout, spokesman at Yokosuka U.S. Navy Base southwest of Tokyo, said there was no new information from U.S. sources on search efforts.

The names of the victims and other details were not immediately available.

The helicopter crash may have been the costliest, in terms of casualties, of any operational incident involving U.S. military personnel in Japan since 1979, when a typhoon damaged a fuel dump at Camp Fuji and the resulting explosion and fire killed one Marine and burned more than 70 others, some severely.