US Marine Osprey crash in Hawaii sparks concern in Okinawa

The deadly crash of a US Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft in Hawaii at the weekend sparked further concern in Okinawa yesterday over the safety of the tilt-rotor aircraft, 24 of which have been deployed at a marine base on the Japanese island prefecture.

"I've 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 near the marines' Futenma Air Station in Ginowan on Okinawa's main island.

Hiroshi Ashitomi, the co-leader of a civic group opposed to the relocation of the marine air base to a coastal area of Nago on the same island, called the aircraft "defective", and said they should not be deployed anywhere in Japan.

In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Japan had asked the United States to provide information about the crash as soon as possible.

"The government intends to steadily assert its stance to the US side that maximum care should be taken with regard to safety," Suga said.

News of the crash sent a shock wave through the Japanese Defence Ministry, coming just days after Japan and the United States announced that the US military would deploy 10 CV-22 aircraft, the air force version of the Osprey, at Yokota Air Base in a Tokyo suburb beginning in 2017.