The last fatal accident was recorded in February 2020, when Commander Eduardo Garvalena’s plane crashed in front of kilometer 6 of La Manga del Mar Menor
The plane crash suffered yesterday by a non-commissioned officer of the Air Force and a flight instructor in the vicinity of the Los Garranchos aerodrome is the latest in a long list of accidents that have occurred in the Region in the last 40 years.
In total, about twenty soldiers have died since 1983 in air accidents that occurred on the Murcian coast. A feeling of ‘déjà vu’ was experienced by some of those present in the rescue efforts of the lifeless body of Commander Eduardo Fermín Garvalena Crespo, whose reactor fell into the Mediterranean early in the afternoon of February 27, 2020, some 300 meters off the coast of La Manga, at kilometer 6. With the same plane (a C-101 that the Ministry permanently retired in August of last year) and in approximately the same place, it crashed a few months earlier, on the 26th of August, Commander Francisco Marín, who was also ‘Solo’ of the Eagle Patrol of the Air Force.
A few weeks later, on September 18, the instructor Daniel Melero and the student lieutenant Rosa Almirón, also from the General Air Academy, lost their lives in the accident of a Tamiz E-26 military aircraft, also in the waters of the Mar Menor, specifically in the vicinity of Santiago de la Ribera and after taking off from San Javier. Three fatal accidents in less than six months.
Between August 2019 and February 2020, the Region lost four pilots from the General Air Academy
Before that, the last fatal air accident had occurred in April 2012, when two other members of the AGA –instructor captain Julio Castellón Bueno and fourth-year student lieutenant Eduardo Castillo– died when they crashed in the vicinity of the Alcalá-Meco prison (Madrid), his C-101 plane on an instruction flight that had departed from San Javier.
More than a hundred deaths in total
In total, since 1983, there have been more than one hundred Spanish soldiers killed in air accidents in national territory. The most serious took place on February 28, 1984, when 18 officials died when a US Air Force C-130 Hercules plane crashed in the municipality of Borja (Zaragoza).
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