All 11 soldiers and Marines on board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that crashed in heavy fog off the Florida Panhandle Tuesday night are presumed lost, but officials stress that they are still engaged in a search-and-rescue mission that will go on for as long as necessary. There were definitely some casualties—human remains have washed ashore along with helicopter debris—but "there's always hope," an Eglin Air Force Base spokesman tells the Pensacola News Journal. Continued heavy fog forced authorities to halt the air search last night, but Coast Guard boats kept searching overnight, CNN reports.
An Eglin spokeswoman tells CNN that there are no signs of anything suspicious in the crash, which happened during a seven-day training mission that involved inserting and extracting Marines from the water. Hundreds of people joined a pier-end vigil last night for the missing men, who came from North Carolina and Louisiana, AL.com reports. "My heart is really hurt right now knowing these people were here just on training—knowing they went and left their family members and did not give that goodbye, you know, because they weren't going off to war," a woman married to a Marine told the AP. President Obama has expressed his condolences, a White House spokesman says. (More Black Hawk stories.)
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