MARANA, Ariz. (AP) -- Military investigators started the gruesome task Tuesday of removing the remains of 19 Marines from the charred wreckage of an Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft that crashed at an airport.
Recovery of the remains was expected to take several days and identification will likely require DNA, fingerprint and other records, said Lt. Mark Carter, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma where the MV-22 Osprey had taken off Saturday."The process is a slow process because it's a detailed operation," he said.
The Osprey crashed Saturday during an evacuation training exercise at Marana Northwest Regional Airport, about 30 miles northwest of Tucson.
The victims were four crew members from Quantico, Va., 14 Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif., and one from Marine Corps Air Station-Miramar in San Diego County, Calif.
A preliminary report on the cause of the crash could be released in a week or two, said Capt. Aisha Bakkar-Poe, a spokeswoman at Marine Corps headquarters.
She said the Marines remain confident of the safety of the innovative Osprey, which is intended as a replacement for the corps' aging fleet of CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters.
By tilting their large rotors, Ospreys can take off like helicopters and then fly like airplanes.
The Marines' other four Ospreys were not flying after the crash, but Bakkar-Poe said that mostly was out of respect for the victims' families and the other Osprey crews.
She said the Osprey that crashed had flown more than 135 hours since it was delivered on Jan. 17. It averaged 40 hours a month in the air, about twice as much as most Marine aircraft, but the extra flight time should not have been a factor in the crash, Bakkar-Poe said.
The Osprey was introduced in September. The Marines have ordered 360 at a cost of $44 million each, said Pentagon spokesman Capt. Rob Winchester.
The mother of one of the victims, Keoki Santos, 24, of Grand Ronde, Ore., said her son had concerns about riding in the Osprey.
"He was really, really nervous about the whole thing," Christina Mercier said. "He was a beautiful, high-spirited, true Marine. He didn't want to just go into the service for four years. He enlisted to be a career man. And they killed him."
The Marine Corps lists two other crashes during the Osprey's development: A 1991 Delaware accident blamed on gyro wiring problems and a 1992 Virginia crash that killed all seven people on board after an engine caught fire.