HONOLULU (AP) — The military on Wednesday said a second Marine has died of injuries he received after an Osprey aircraft crashed during a training exercise last weekend in Hawaii.
Lance Cpl. Matthew Determan of Maricopa, Arizona, was among several people who were injured when the MV-22 Osprey went down at Bellows Air Force Station outside Honolulu on Sunday. The military said in a statement that Determan, 21, died on Tuesday.
“Our country and our Corps are poorer for his loss, but his example will continue to inspire us,” said Col. Vance L. Cryer, the commander of the 15th Expeditionary Unit. The death of Lance Cpl. Joshua Barron, 24, of Spokane, Washington, had been announced earlier.
The Osprey, which can fly like a helicopter and a fixed-wing airplane, went down with 21 Marines and a Navy corpsman on board. Two other Marines are still hospitalized in stable condition, Capt. Brian Block said Wednesday.
The Osprey had taken off from the USS Essex, a Navy ship 100 miles offshore. It was flying to Oahu to drop off infantry Marines for training on land, said Block, a spokesman for the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
The crash didn’t stop the unit’s exercises, Block said. The Marines also don’t plan to ground their fleet of Ospreys, despite calls to do so from the governor of Okinawa, Japan, where many of the aircraft are based.
There was still no word on a cause of the crash in the latest statement. The Ospreys took part this week in the inaugural U.S. Pacific Command Amphibious Leaders Symposium at Bellows Air Force Station on Oahu. However, the training exercise that included the crash was not part of that event.
The Osprey is a tilt-rotor aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter but flies like an airplane, which gives it a longer range than traditional helicopters.