Four US Marines have died after a US Marine Corps aircraft crashed during a Nato training exercise in the mountains of northern Norway on Friday.
Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Stoere tweeted that they died in the crash. The cause of the incident is being investigated, but Norwegian police reported bad weather in the area.
An MV-22B Osprey aircraft was involved in the crash, the Marine Corps said in a statement on Twitter on Friday.
The craft was reported missing around 6.30pm Central European Time, about 30 minutes after it was scheduled to land. It was heading north in Nordland on its way to Bodoe, according to the Norwegian military.
A search mission was launched immediately with a rescue helicopter and a Norwegian military jet spotting the crashed Osprey in a rugged area. Bad weather conditions prevented rescue aircraft from landing at the crash site.
At 1.30am on Saturday, the police arrived at the scene and confirmed that the aircraft’s crew of four had died.
Norwegian newspaper VG said Red Cross members drove close to the crash site with scooters and marked the trail with GPS for police in what they described as extremely difficult weather conditions early Saturday.
“It was a special night, it was a real storm. There were five of us driving towards the scene of the accident. There was 1 metre of visibility, snow and storm in the mountains,” Red Cross team leader Oerjan Kristensen told VG. “I guess it was a wind gust of 30-40 metres per second. When it blows like that, it is difficult to stand upright.”
The incident occurred during Exercise Cold Response, a Nato training exercise focused on conducting operations in an arctic environment. It involves around 30,000 troops, 220 aircraft and 50 vessels from 27 countries. The exercises began on March 14 and will end on April 1.
The Norwegian armed forces said that Cold Response “will carry on as planned, with the measures we have to take due to the weather”.
US military Ospreys, which have tilting rotors that can point upward like a helicopter or forward like an airplane, have been involved in several crashes in years past.
Cold Response 22 is the largest military exercise in Norway since the Cold War, and is taking place within a few hundred miles of the Russian border. However, officials say the event was planned long before Russia invaded Ukraine.
