News Analysis: Ospreys growing reputation for taking off like helicopters, flying like planes, but landing like bricks

The administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has done little to ease the fears of local municipalities around the country, including those in Okinawa Prefecture, the tiny island of which is currently a powder keg over issues pertaining to a superfluity of U.S. military presence there and discrimination from the mainland, following the recent crash of a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft in Hawaii on Sunday.

Local analysts said the timing of the crash, which left two Marines dead at the Marine Corps Training Area Bellows on Oahu, Hawaii, following what has been described as a"hard landing"by the plane which also caught fire, could not be worse for Abe's military plans in twine with the United States, as on May 12 the prime minister and the defense ministry here welcomed news from the Pentagon that the U.S. military will deploy CV-22 Osprey transport aircraft at the Yokota Air Base in Tokyo in 2017.

The U.S. military said it plans to send three of the tilt-rotor planes to the Yokota base, located in a suburb of Tokyo, in the second half of 2017, adding that seven more will be deployed by 2021.

The news marks the first time the CV-22 Osprey will be used officially outside of Okinawa Prefecture, where the planes were first deployed to the U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station in 2012.

Despite the plane's seeming concentration in Okinawa, officials up and down the country have been up in arms as following the plane's initial deployment, the hard-to-miss airplane, which can take off and land like a helicopter, but fly like a regular plane, have been spotted flying drills all over Japan. "The original proviso for having the planes based in Okinawa was that they would fly limited drills over the mainland due to the government still not fully declaring the notorious plane perfectly safe following a number of high-profile crashes in the recent past,"pacific affairs research and defense analyst, Laurent Sinclair, told Xinhua. "But as we know the planes have been seen over Shikoku and in Shiga Prefecture, in western Japan, in Kanagawa Prefecture next to Tokyo, flying into the Atsugi base and also flying into the Yokota airbase in western Tokyo, and sightings have been made over Tohoku and Hokkaido,"Sinclair said, adding that a number of the operations fell outside the government's original commitment to its local municipalities.

The U.S. Department of Defense has said, ahead of divulging any clear information on the cause of the latest crash and its similarity with previous fatal crashes, that it still plans to station a special operations squadron of the planes in Yokota in 2017 and that it has no plans to change any of the operations or ground the flights of its Ospreys currently stationed here.

Rather than grounding fleets of potentially fault-plagued planes, Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren somewhat bizarrely stated at a recent press conference that there were "no plans to adjust our flight operations in Japan or elsewhere,"adding that "it's too soon to really raise questions about the safety of the technology." "This is a rather shocking reaction considering the planes' history of similar crashes,"said Sinclair."You'd expect the U.S. side this time around to provide more assurances to Japan, being that local areas in Japan have basically been browbeaten into hosting the accident-prone plane, which could ultimately threaten the lives of their citizens, were an incident to happen in a populated area,"he said. "To add insult to injury the Pentagon has said that a full investigation could take 'months upon months' and in saying so is tacitly allowing a potentially faulty plane to stay operational, while refusing to give a clear indication of when a thorough investigation will be concluded,"Sinclair added.

The Pentagon's seeming ambivalence to the issue, runs absolutely contrary to the "impression"Lt. Gen. Sam Angelella, commander of the U.S. Forces in Japan, has tried to give, telling Japan's Defense Minister Gen Nakatani that the provision of information on the accident"will be done swiftly."

Sinclair went on to say that for the people living near the U.S. Futenma airbase in the crowded downtown Ginowan district in Okinawa, it would be a daily nightmare seeing these hybrid planes flying overhead, not knowing when one of them is going to drop out of the sky and plow into a school or shopping mall. "It has renewed my sense of fear that we don't know when an Osprey flying overhead might go down in a residential area," said Chieko Oshiro, a 61-year-old resident living near the Futenma base told local media.

Hiroshi Ashitomi, the co-leader of a civic group opposed to a new U.S. base being build in a coastal region also on the island, described the plane as "defective." He said the plane "should not be deployed anywhere in Japan," according to local reports.

The least the Pentagon could do, Sinclair added, is provide some assurances to the citizens here, not to mention in the U.S. and everywhere else the Osprey has been deployed, and Abe and his defense ministry should be demanding answers, but instead we have, as is the crux of the Japan-U.S. alliance, a very submissive and reticent Japan, compared to its bigger brother who is calling the shots.

Local leaders in Japan, in lieu of any support from Abe and the central government, are being forced to take matters into their own hands, with Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga, stating that he will demand the immediate suspension of the 24 MV-22 Ospreys that have been deployed to the island until the cause of the crash is found.

Onaga, a staunch opponent to the planned relocation of the Futenma base to the coastal Henoko region on the island, said the plane's use at Futenma should be halted immediately.

On the heels of the government here hailing the building up of the number of Ospreys here, the latest incident has given credence to other officials who have previously voiced their concerns about the plane, including Ikuo Kato, mayor of Fussa City which hosts the Yokota Air Base, who said the central government here was at fault over this issue for forcing local municipalities into accepting decisions (to host the plane) that have already been green-lit without sufficient consultation with regional heads.

Kato also said that if the two governments continue to act in such a manner, cities like Fussa who are being coerced into hosting more U.S. military hardware could see anti-U.S. sentiment grow, as has been the case in Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the U.S. military bases in Japan.

Tokyo Governor Yoichi Masuzoe previously insisted that safety is prioritized for residents near the bases hosting the Ospreys, and his calls following the latest crash have become all the more crucial, if not urgent.

Indeed, a former captain with the 36th Airlift Squadron at Yokota Airbase believes that safety should now be of paramount importance and that a temporary grounding of all Ospreys makes perfect sense. "I flew the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, which is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft and is hugely different to the Osprey, but I've often seen the Osprey in action and while its a very capable piece of hardware, with the ability to be deployed quickly to areas other planes can't get to and with a payload far greater than that of a helicopter, it has earned itself a bad reputation due to these crashes,"the former captain told Xinhua requesting anonymity. "If it were my squadron attached to a plane I didn't fully have faith in, I would do everything in my power to have the situation addressed, and if that meant we were grounded for a while, which is a pilot's worst nightmare, so be it. Better be grounded and still breathing,"he said. "Now, if there's an incident in Japan and the Pentagon has continued to turn a blind eye to this plane's history, it's going to be hugely embarrassing for the U.S. and will further add to the Japanese locals'mistrust of the U.S. military and its hardware in Japan and could see relations frayed on a diplomatic and local level," said the pilot, who is now a permanent resident in Japan.

With the Hawaii crash now topping the list, the plane was also in the headlines last August when four crew members narrowly escaped injury when a Marine Corps' Osprey made what investigators also called a "hard landing" near the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada in the United States.

In April 2012, an Osprey crashed in Morocco and killed two Marines and another crash in Florida in June 2012 injured all five crew members. Thirty marines lost their lives in three crashes, including 19 in a single accident in Arizona in 2000 during the Osprey's developmental phase, launching the plane's checkered safety record. In 2010, an Air Force CV-22, each of which costs around 100 million U.S. dollars, touched down short of its landing zone in Afghanistan, hit a ditch and flipped over, killing four Marines. Endi