UPDATE - Vietnam military finds downed chopper; 3 dead

*UPDATES WITH CHOPPER FOUND

By Bennett Murray

HANOI, Vietnam (AA) – Vietnam's military located the wreckage and crew of an air force helicopter in the country's south Wednesday, almost 36 hours after it went missing during a training flight.

The Eurocopter EC130 -- a single engine helicopter used as a trainer -- had crashed in mountains around 80 kilometers (49.7 miles) from Ho Chi Minh City, killing the three people on board.

According to the VN Express news site, the bodies and wreckage were discovered on Ba Rịa-Vung Tau province’s Mount Palace, where a plume of black smoke was observed after contact was lost.

One pilot and two student pilots were in the chopper when it went missing.

Around 400 soldiers and local residents, who were mobilized by the military to aid the search, had been combing the area despite poor weather and the rough terrain.

The cause of the crash is yet to be established.

The crash comes four months after a Vietnamese coastguard CASA C-212 turboprop went down taking nine lives in the Gulf of Tonkin.

It had been searching for another downed plane, a Su-30 fighter jet, that had disappeared two days before.

The state of repair of the Vietnamese military’s air fleet is a sensitive topic for the government, which revoked the credentials of local journalist Mai Phan Loi after he speculated on social media that corruption in the military was responsible for shoddy maintenance following June’s crashes.

Loi was "seriously damaging the reputation of [the] Vietnamese People's Army,” said Information Minister Truong Minh Tuan in a statement.

Vietnam’s military aircraft are mostly decades-old planes and helicopters from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries.

But with the United States’ arms embargo lifted, Vietnam may now buy modern U.S. aircraft on a case-by-case basis.