What is the US Navy doing on Japan’s Iwo Jima, nearly 75 years after World War II?

When the pilot of an F/A-18 Super Hornet punches his afterburner, a number of things are simultaneously apparent to anyone standing nearby. Propelled by an engine that is producing around 22,000 pounds of thrust, the aircraft visibly leaps forward on a tapering jet of blue flame.

And the roar of those twin engines is not only heard, despite the use of ear protectors, but physically felt. It wells up in the chest cavity and leaves the extremities tingling well after the aircraft rolls down the runway and takes to the skies.

Iwo To is considered perfect largely because the drills are extremely noisy, and both Japan and the US want to do everything they can to avoid antagonising people living near US bases in mainland Japan.

Pilots from Carrier Air Wing Five, attached to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, conducted FCLP exercises over a period of 10 days in mid-May to make sure their flying skills were up to the required levels.

The pilots of all fixed-wing aircraft aboard the Ronald Reagan – which is forward deployed at the US naval base at Yokosuka, southwest of Tokyo – are required to regularly demonstrate their ability to land on a carrier, with the precise 200-metre dimensions of the vessel’s deck marked out on a conventional runway on the island.

Single-seater F/A-18E and twin-cockpit F/A-18F variants of the Super Hornet were operating in patterns of six aircraft each, about one minute apart. The jets are required to circle the island and practise hitting the runway within the exacting parameters. Each of the landings is scored by an instructor, who sometimes livens things up by giving pilots last-second variations on the drill, such as aborting a landing just metres above the runway.