Searchers were looking on Wednesday for two crew members who had been onboard a Navy aircraft that crashed near Mount Rainier during a training flight a day earlier, according to Navy officials.
The condition of the two people was not known as of Tuesday, according to the Navy.
On Wednesday, an update said that aerial operations had continued through the night and were focused on the area 30 miles west of Yakima.
”Responders are facing mountainous terrain, cloudy weather, and low visibility as the search is ongoing,” the release said.
It did not identify the two crew members and neither they, nor any wreckage, have been found so far.
The cause of the crash, which took place after 3 p.m., was being investigated, the Navy said. Search and rescue teams from the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, along with an MH-60S helicopter, headed to the crash site east of Mount Rainier to look for the crew members, it said.
The Boeing EA-18G Growler, a specialized electronic attack aircraft, is part of the Navy’s “first line of defense in hostile environments,” according to its website. It is used by the VAQ-130 squadron, the oldest electronic warfare squadron in the U.S. Navy, known as the “Zappers.”
The squadron had returned to Whidbey Island from a recent deployment, the Navy said in its statement on Tuesday. It had carried out operations in the Southern Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden to “maintain the freedom of navigation in international waterways,” the Navy said in an earlier statement about the deployment.
During the nine-month deployment, the squadron had conducted nearly 700 combat missions to “degrade the Houthi capability to threaten innocent shipping,” the release said.
The Houthis, the de facto government in northern Yemen that is backed by Iran, have launched attacks on ships sailing through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a crucial shipping route.
All but one of the squadrons using the EA-18G Growler are based at the naval station on Whidbey Island. The station had notified the public of scheduled training operations this week.
Military training flights have led to dangerous and even fatal crashes in recent years. In August, an Army helicopter crashed during a routine training at a military base in Alabama, killing a flight instructor and injuring a student pilot. In 2021, a military training jet crashed into a backyard in Lake Worth, Texas, injuring the plane’s two pilots and damaging several homes.
