Spotlight: Japan checks noise levels of controversial Osprey aircraft, safety record, noises remains an issue

Officials from Japan's Ministry of Defense (MOD) on Monday set up drills to investigate noise levels of the controversial U.S. Osprey transportation aircraft at the Ground Self-Defense Force's Camp Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture, close to Tokyo.

The exercises to monitor the noise levels of the tilt-rotor planes, that can take off and land like a helicopter and fly like a regular aircraft, were conducted at the GSDF's camp Kisarazu which will be responsible for maintaining the aircraft from early next year.

The Ospreys will be deployed from the Futenma Air Station in Okinawa, central to a relocation dispute between local officials in Okinawa and the central government, with the planes having garnered a great deal of criticism from local officials and citizens here for its checkered safety record as well as its excessive noise.

The exercises conducted Monday saw the MOD record the noise levels from two Ospreys as they both flew and hovered around the GSDF base, with the levels compared to that of the GSDF's CH47 transport helicopter conducting the same maneuvers. The results of the test have yet to be released.

The mayor of Kisarazu, Yoshikuni Watanabe, held talks with U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy who visited the Kisarazu base on Monday.

Kennedy was quoted as expressing her appreciation to the mayor for his support, although Watanabe has urged the maintenance program to show consideration towards the local citizens, particularly regarding the planes' safety record.

The accident-prone planes' safety was called into question most recently by local officials and citizens here in May last year when an MV-22B Osprey crashed in Hawaii, leaving two dead and 20 more injured.

In August a year earlier, concerns about the plane were further stoked here when four crew members narrowly escaped injury when a Marine Corps' Osprey made what investigators called a "hard landing" near the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the United States.

Prior to that, 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, and 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.

Regarding the excessive noise caused by the Ospreys, a court in Japan handed down a ruling in October ordering the state to pay 558 million yen (5.37 million U.S. dollars) in damages to residents in the area over excessive noise from aircraft at the Iwakuni base, which is jointly used by the U.S. military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Yamaguchi Prefecture, in the Chugoku region on Japan's main island of Honshu.

The Yamaguchi District Court ordered the unprecedented penalty for excessive noise at the base to the residents in the locale in western Japan, with lawyers seeking compensation to the tune of 1.8 billion yen for the residents' prior exposure to excessive noise and a further 23,000 yen in compensation payable monthly per person for future noise that would have to be endured.

The judge presiding over the case fully acknowledged in handing down his verdict that the residents in the vicinity of the airbase had "suffered psychologically and sustained health damage," and accepted that even the residents' ability to "hold a basic conversation or sleep normally" had been severely disrupted by the level of noise from the aircrafts.

The plaintiffs at the time also petitioned the central government to suspend some of the flights from the base and called for U.S. fighter jets flying to Iwakuni from the Atsugi base near Tokyo, that are involved in aircraft carrier maneuvers, to be cancelled, as well as a blanket ban on all flights from the notorious, accident-prone MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircrafts. Enditem