Japan's air force recovers suspected Global Hawk wreckage off Tottori as salvage gears up

Japan's Air Self-Defense Force said late on 8 October that a civilian salvage ship had recovered an object believed to be part of the RQ-4B Global Hawk surveillance drone that crashed into the Sea of Japan off Tottori Prefecture in September, Kyodo News and the Mainichi Shimbun reported. The ASDF said it was still working out which part of the aircraft the object came from.

The ship, which is searching the seabed with an uncrewed underwater vehicle, made the recovery the same day. Separately, a relatively large object thought to be part of the airframe has been located underwater about 50 kilometres off the Aoya district of Tottori city, and a recovery barge is due on site on 13 October to begin full-scale lifting work, according to the ASDF.

The drone, assigned to Misawa Air Base in Aomori Prefecture, took off on the morning of 15 September. Its link with ground control equipment at Misawa was lost from 12:55 p.m. local time, after which it disappeared from radar, the Mainichi reported. An ASDF release cited by Stars and Stripes put the take-off at 10:20 a.m. and the radar loss at 12:58 p.m., about 30 miles north of Tottori.

A month-long salvage

ASDF Chief of Staff Gen. Takehiro Morita told a regular news conference on 6 October that a guard ship reached the area on 30 September and that the mother ship for the remotely operated vehicle began searching on 2 October. He said search and recovery work was expected to take roughly a month from that date, depending on sea and weather conditions, with safety given top priority.

At that briefing, Morita said the underwater search had not yet brought anything to the surface, although the vessel had pinpointed the position of an object thought to be part of the aircraft and options for recovering it were being studied. The find reported on 8 October came two days later.

Recovered wreckage is to be taken to Misawa so investigators can determine the cause of the crash, the Sankei Shimbun reported. Kyodo reported when lifting work began on 2 October that the ASDF had signed a contract worth about 1.15 billion yen with Tokyo-based salvage firm Offshore Engineering, and that a Maritime Self-Defense Force vessel found the submerged object on 24 September at a depth of about 200 to 300 metres.

The September loss was the first crash of a Global Hawk in Japanese service and took one of the ASDF's three RQ-4B high-altitude surveillance drones out of the fleet. A Defence Ministry spokesman said at the time that Self-Defense Force missions would not be hampered, according to Stars and Stripes.