Japan's air force lifts suspected fuselage of its crashed Global Hawk military drone from the seabed

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force said on 17 October that it had recovered an object believed to be part of the fuselage of the RQ-4B Global Hawk military surveillance drone that crashed into the Sea of Japan off Tottori Prefecture in September. A civilian salvage vessel working under contract to the air force lifted the object with a crane from waters about 50 kilometres off the Aoya district of Tottori city, at a depth of roughly 200 to 300 metres, according to the Sankei Shimbun and TV Asahi.

During its search of the crash area the air force had located what it described as a relatively large object, and the recovery ship began full-scale lifting work on 13 October. The air force plans to keep raising wreckage from the surrounding waters before taking it to Misawa Air Base in Aomori Prefecture, the unmanned aircraft's home base, where investigators will work to establish why it went down. NHK reported that the airframe will be analysed to determine the detailed cause of the accident.

The drone was lost on 15 September. Its track vanished from radar at about 1 pm, roughly 50 kilometres north of the Tottori coast, while it was flying a mission, and contact with the aircraft was cut. On 24 September a large object thought to be part of its structure was found, TV Asahi reported.

Debris has also reached land. A piece of the aircraft found on the coast of Izumo in neighbouring Shimane Prefecture was recovered on 11 October, the first time wreckage had turned up anywhere other than off Tottori, Aomori Broadcasting reported for the NNN network. The air force has kept searching the shorelines of both prefectures and has confirmed remains of the aircraft in each, and it said it aimed to finish raising the airframe by early November.

The crashed drone belonged to the air force's Global Hawk fleet at Misawa. Japan began buying the RQ-4B in fiscal 2015 to strengthen its ability to keep wide areas under constant surveillance, and the third aircraft arrived at Misawa in June 2023, completing the fleet the air force had originally planned, according to the force's own description of the type. It lists the high-altitude drone's endurance at about 36 hours, its top speed at about 310 knots and its ceiling at about 60,000 feet.

Neither the air force announcement nor the reports on the recovery said what caused the crash, whether any problem with the aircraft had been identified, or how the loss of one of the three drones affects the surveillance flights the fleet was bought to provide.