The 15 Marines and one Navy corpsman killed on July 10, when a Marine Corps KC-130T Hercules aircraft exploded mid-air over Mississippi, have been identified.
The casualties included members of Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 452, as well as six Marines and one Navy corpsman from 2nd Marine Raider Battalion. The Raiders killed in the crash were part of the same Marine Special Operations Team (MSOT 8321) that lost seven men in a UH-60 crash in Florida in 2015, according to Dan Lamothe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the Washington Post.
The incident is the latest in a series of fatal aviation accidents within the Marine Corps and the deadliest in more than a decade, when a CH-53E Super Stallion crash in western Iraq killed 30 Marines and one sailor in 2005. More recently, 12 Marines were killed when a pair of CH-53Es collided over Hawaii in January 2016.
The aircraft was transporting personnel and equipment from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina to Naval Air Facility El Centro in California, when an as-of-yet unidentified incident caused the aircraft to break into two pieces, with debris found at two separate sites, a mile apart, reports The Washington Post. Most of the remains were delivered to Jackson Medgar Evers International Airport July 13, according to the Associated Press.
The names and unit information of those lost in the crash are listed below as identified by the Marine Corps on Twitter on July 14.
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