The search ended successfully: the United States Navy announced that it had managed to recover the plane on August 3 F-18E Super Hornet embarked aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and sank on July 8, 2022 Mediterranean Sea- for “bad weather”. After nearly a month of research, which took place not far from the Italian coast, US Navy teams were able to locate the fighter and hoist it aboard the Everest vessel, which was busy investigating. The MPV Everest is, as Repubblica reports, a ship belonging to the Luxembourg company Maritime Construction Services “which is used to repair underwater pipelines and oil platforms”. The plane was then taken to a “nearby military base,” according to US Navy reports, and then sent to the United States, although it’s not clear at what base the F-18 is currently based. .
For the US, it’s the closure of an incident that has alarmed (and also embarrassed) the Navy. Recently some incidents with US fleet, both in terms of naval units and aviation, have highlighted some structural deficiencies of the Navy. Problems that come at a rather delicate moment, also with regard to the challenge with Russia, and which particularly affected the Mediterranean. For example, the Uss Truman accident, involving the F-18 that crashed in the Mediterranean, occurred at a time when the US Navy wanted to send a strong signal of presence in the Euro-Mediterranean region, precisely in opposition to the activities of Moscow. For some time the Pentagon and the various forces of the Atlantic Alliance have warned of the presence of the Russian Navy in this area, and it is clear that this continuous and sustained traffic of enemy units creates a state of constant tension. And also of extreme attention to any episode that could give the opposing forces an advantage.
The advantage in this case could be to discover some fragments of the aircraft in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, where there are also submarine units of the Russian fleet. The question was also asked for another incident, namely the one in which a British F-35B crashed off the eastern Mediterranean Sea in November. On this occasion, several NATO units took part due to the proximity of the accident site from the Russian port of Tartus in Syria. On that occasion, the presence of escort ships to the aircraft carrier Truman made it difficult for vehicles to approach the Kremlin (at that time a hydrographic research boat was approaching), but it is clear that the possibility exists Russian espionage and the willingness to quickly close this incident made the search for the F-18 urgent.