2nd LD Writethru: U.S. military suspends Osprey flights in Japan's Okinawa as local residents voice anger

The U.S. military has agreed to suspend all its Osprey flights in Okinawa until the cause of a recent accident involving the tiltrotor aircraft is known, said the Japanese government.

A U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft belonging to the Futenma base in the city of Ginowan made a water crash-landing off Okinawa on Tuesday night.

All the five crew members aboard were ejected out of the aircraft and were rescued and sent to a U.S. naval hospital. Two of them were injured.

The aircraft, on a training flight, was believed to in the course of refueling when the accident happened.

Photos from local news showed that the aircraft had broken into several pieces in waters off the coast.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was quoted by local media as saying that the Osprey accident was "very deplorable."

Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga, for his part, called the Osprey accident "outrageous."

"I would like to summon the chief of the Defense Ministry's Okinawa Defense Bureau and a Foreign Ministry official assigned to Okinawa and other officials to strongly relay how Okinawans feel," he was quoted as saying.

"It was a serious accident that should not have happened, and we ask for a thorough investigation into the cause of it," said Yoshinori Yamaguchi, governor of Saga prefecture, which has also been asked by the central government to host the Osprey aircraft.

The U.S. military has deployed dozens of Osprey aircraft in its Futenma base in Okinawa, which has caused serious concerns from locals for a long time due to the aircraft's record of fatal accidents.

Tuesday night's accident was the first one involving the American military tiltrotor aircraft in Japan, but a number of accidents have been reported over the years in the U.S. and some other places, causing multiple fatalities.

The accident has added to the fury and resentment of local people against the U.S. military presence in Okinawa as well as the Japanese central government's support for such presence, and a number of protests were held around the nation.

"It's really scary to think that the aircraft could have fallen in the populated urban area," said a local resident in Okinawa.

There are also concerns that the U.S. transport aircraft, built by Boeing Co. and Textron Inc's Bell Helicopter and designed to take off like a helicopter and fly like a plane, are "faulty" and "accident-prone."

The U.S. Futenma base is located in the densely populated urban area of Ginowan. The Japanese and U.S. governments have been seeking to move the base to the less-populated Henoko coastal area of Nago.

The people of Okinawa, however, have been demanding the Futenma base to be relocated outside the prefecture, due to crimes involving the U.S. base personnel as well as noise and safety problems.

The accident came before a ruling on the dispute between the central and local governments over the Futenma relocation plan, which is expected to be made by Japan's Supreme Court on Dec. 20.

The Japanese central government and the Okinawa government started a legal fight by suing each other over the disputed Futenma relocation plan last year, which was halted in March when a settlement deal was reached under court mediation.

The central government reopen the legal battle in July by filing a fresh lawsuit, seeking the court's confirmation that Onaga acted illegally in not complying with a state order to retract his revocation of former governor's permission for the landfill work of the Futenma air base relocation.

In a ruling issued later, a high court said the current relocation plan is the only way to address the problems at the Futenma base. The Okinawa government appealed the ruling later and a ruling is expected to be made by the supreme court later this month.

Okinawa hosts some 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan while accounting for only 0.6 percent of the country's total land mass. Endit