Marines to Honor 4 Victims of Helicopter Crash

Memorial services will be conducted Wednesday for the four U.S. Marines based in Tustin who were killed Friday when their helicopter exploded in midair and crashed during a training flight in Okinawa.

Services for Capt. Neal T. Lippy, 27; 1st Lt. Charles C. Alsworth Jr., 30; Sgt. Timothy C. Walker, 25, and Cpl. Charles R. Tyler Jr., 21, will be held at 2:45 p.m. in the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station chapel, Marine Sgt. Ron Turner, station spokesman, said. The services will be open to the public.

The four Marines were attached to Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361 at the Tustin base and had been on a rotating assignment in Okinawa for the past six months. They were due to return in three months, a Marine spokeswoman said.

Went Down on Hillside

Their helicopter, a CH-53D Sea Stallion, went down on a hillside about 1:15 p.m. Friday, approximately 44 miles northeast of Naha, the Japanese island’s capital. The helicopter was assigned to the Futenma Marine Base near Naha, about 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo.

Since 1981, 30 Tustin-based Marines have died in CH-53D Sea Stallion or CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter crashes, Staff Sgt. Vicki Conkel, a Marine spokeswoman, said. Fifteen of those men have died in the last nine weeks, Conkel added. The helicopters are manufactured by Sikorsky Aircraft Co., a unit of United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, Conn.

A Feb. 10, 1984, crash killed six Tustin Marines. On March 24, 1984, four more died under similar circumstances. On April 14, 1984, another was killed in a helicopter crash, and on June 1, another four crashed to their death. In 1985, 11 Tustin Marines were among 17 who died in a May 6 crash, and last Friday’s crash killed four more, Conkel said.

The cause of Friday’s accident still has not been determined, according to Maj. Anthony Rothfork, a spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington.

“An investigation will be conducted into the cause of the accident,” Rothfork said. “But there is no new information. . . . With regard to the accident last May, salvage operations have been completed as of last week, and an investigation is continuing on that one, too.”

An engineering analysis must still be done on the wreckage of the helicopter which plunged into the sea off southern Japan on May 6, killing all 17 Marines aboard, Rothfork said, “and that will take quite some time to complete.”

As a result of the recent helicopter crashes, Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) is drafting a resolution that will go to the city governments of Los Alamitos, Stanton, Anaheim, Orange and Villa Park, asking for their support in requesting that the military reroute helicopters involved in maneuvers that now fly over highly populated urban areas, a Dannemeyer spokesman said.

And Rep. Robert Dornan (R-Garden Grove) said he will visit the Tustin station Wednesday to investigate the helicopters, most of which are 15 to 20 years old.

“If these planes were used in war times, their lifetimes would be three to four years,” Dornan said in a telephone interview from his Virginia home. “I want to find out what the problem is. . . . This could just be a coincidence.”