Farnborough 2012 - MV-22 Osprey

Protests as US Osprey aircraft arrive in Japan

The US military's Osprey aircraft arrived in Japan Monday as residents rallied against their deployment after recent crashes raised safety concerns.

Live television footage showed the MV-22s being unloaded from a cargo ship at the US Marines' base in Iwakuni, western Japan.

Local protesters in a dozen small boats demonstrated against the controversial aircraft's arrival, chanting "We don't want the dangerous Osprey!" and "Osprey, go back to America".

The demonstration against the unloading of the 12 aircraft would continue throughout the day, protest organiser Kiyoshi Oka told AFP by telephone.

Although local governments in Japan have no legal grounds to reject the US deployment plan, strong local resentment, in particular in Okinawa where the aircraft will be based, could further erode public support for the government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.

The US military plans to fully deploy Osprey aircraft to Okinawa in October, while the governor of the sub-tropical Japanese island chain has denounced the US plan because of safety concerns.

Following checkups at Iwakuni, the aircraft is destined for the Marine Corps airbase of Futenma in Okinawa, which has been at the centre of a long-running stand-off as it sits in a developing urban area.

A separate rally was held outside the Futenma base Monday with protesters holding banners that said "We are opposed to deployment", Jiji Press reported.

A huge US military presence in Okinawa, accounting for around half of the 47,000 troops Washington has in Japan, has angered islanders there.

Concerns over the Osprey came after the two countries clinched a deal earlier this year under which the United States will shift 9,000 Marines out of Japan in a step designed to ease friction with Tokyo over the US military footprint.

The Osprey is a hybrid aircraft with rotors that allow it to take off like a helicopter and engines that can tilt forward, enabling it to fly like an airplane at greater speed than a chopper.

The aircraft was plagued with problems in its early years in the 1990s, but US officials say the technical glitches have been cleared up and the US Marine Corps says it has proven invaluable.

A US Air Force CV-22 Osprey crashed in Florida in June, injuring all five crew members. US officials said the accident was not due to mechanical problem.

In April, an MV-22 Osprey -- the variant that arrived in Japan -- crashed in Morocco, killing two Marines.

The mayor of Iwakuni as well as three members of Noda's Democratic Party of Japan have also voiced their opposition to the Osprey deployment.

The deployment of the Osprey "is a vital component in fulfilling the United States' commitment to provide for the defence of Japan and to help maintain peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region", the US embassy in Japan said in a statement issued Monday.

"The United States and Japan have agreed that US forces in Japan will refrain from any flight operations of the MV-22 in Japan until the results of investigations into recent incidents in Morocco and Florida are presented," it said.

The probe results are expected to be delivered to Tokyo officials by August, the embassy said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura, the government's top spokesman, told reporters Monday that "we will make utmost efforts in obtaining understanding" from local residents on the Osprey deployment by providing information on US probes into the latest accidents.

Japanese Defence Minister Satoshi Morimoto said Japan will send its own investigation team to Washington.

V-22 Osprey a shape-shifter that has come of age

Derided as an unsafe ugly duckling during its development, the vertical takeoff V-22 Osprey aircraft has indeed blossomed into a swan. Now widely deployed by the US air force, this high-speed plane is attracting widespread attention, including from the UAE. David Black reports

Helicopters transformed the battlefield, moving troops and equipment directly to where they were needed at 150kph and depositing them vertically on a landing zone. The V-22 Osprey can do all of that - but travelling to its drop-off and pick-up points at a maximum speed of 463kph.

"It can do everything a helicopter can do," says Major Fernando Zapata, an operations officer in the 8th special operations squadron of the US air force. "Except you get there quicker."

Maj Zapata is out on the flight line at Hurlburt Field air force base in the Florida panhandle, home to the USAF's special operations command, which "has a requirement" for 53 of the CV-22 Ospreys.

The tanned, shaven-headed Maj Zapata is a helicopter pilot by trade, but from the evangelical language he uses to describe this unlikely looking aircraft, he is a convert. Obviously there is more to the Osprey than just being faster than a helicopter.

"It's the greatest fun to fly," he says. "Pretty much a dream. You get behind that stick and you know you're not flying a helicopter. You're not flying a fixed-wing [aircraft] either. It's a tilt-rotor, and I guess we're still finding out just exactly what that's going to mean."

The UAE Air Force is also keen to find out what it's going to mean. Since the Osprey's crowd-pleasing appearance at last year's Dubai Airshow, Boeing-Bell has been in discussions to sell the aircraft to the Emirates, India, Japan and Canada.

This week the Osprey is strutting its stuff at the Farnborough International Airshow in England. But it has taken a long time to get here.

The aircraft began life as a result of a US department of defence requirement issued in 1981 for a joint-service vertical take-off and landing experimental aircraft. It first took to the air in 1989, but it was to take two decades, four fatal accidents, a reputation for unreliability and several attempts by politicians to kill it off, before Boeing-Bell managed to turn this ugly duckling into a swan.

Now, despite having US$500 billion (Dh1.83 trillion) chopped out of its budget, the Pentagon is buying 360 MV-22s for the US Marine Corps in addition to its USAF special forces quota, and potentially, a further 50 for the US navy.

Yet seldom has an aircraft encountered so much public hostility. There were problems - leaking hydraulics, engine mounts that had a habit of catching fire and its rotor performance in certain flight configurations made the aircraft unstable. Three training crashes killed a total of 30 Marines.

In 2007, a Time magazine cover story labelled the Osprey "A Flying Shame" and in the past year The New York Times has described the V-22 as "accident-prone" and "unsafe".

But as Richard Whittle points out in The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey, his book on the development of this revolutionary aircraft, the engineers were working at the cutting edge.

The V-22 is a complicated aircraft, engineering-wise. It takes myriad hydraulic and fuel lines to tilt and drive almost 500 kilograms of 6,100-horsepower engine on each wing tip. And it is a shape-shifter, so the wing must take all the stresses as the rotors tilt at full-power and transform the aircraft from turbo-prop transport plane into helicopter.

The fuselage must also be tough enough to resist all the resulting structural stresses. Adding to the challenge, the engineers had to design rotors that folded to save space so the V-22 could operate from ships.

This was a new type of aircraft, with new kinds of challenges. Yes, there were engineering problems - but problems are what engineers fix.

Okinawa governor rejects plan for U.S. Ospreys

TOKYO — The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa is opposing a plan to deploy U.S. Osprey aircraft there following recent crashes.

Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima told Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto in a meeting Sunday he could not accept the U.S. plan to deploy the new aircraft, which combine airplane-like wings with rotors that allow it to take off and land like a helicopter.

A crash in April killed two Marines, and another last month injured five airmen.

The Pentagon says officials will brief Japan on the two crashes, including an initial finding that the April accident was not caused by mechanical failure.

Morimoto also visited southwestern Yamaguchi prefecture, where officials also rejected the Osprey.

Okinawa bears much of the burden of hosting U.S. troops in Japan.

Osprey crashes could delay deployment to Japan

Recent crashes involving the U.S. military’s latest transport aircraft are fueling an uproar in Japan that could threaten plans to deploy them to the southern island of Okinawa by the end of the year.

Following an uproar on Okinawa and in another city likely to host the Osprey aircraft, U.S. officials were to brief Japanese government representatives in Washington on Friday.

The Osprey can fly like a helicopter or an airplane and has been used in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a crash in April killed two Marines and another last week injured five airmen.

Japan’s top government spokesman said last week the plan to deploy the aircraft to Japan this year couldn’t move forward until Tokyo received assurances of its safety.

While saying the U.S. takes Japan’s concerns seriously, a Pentagon spokesman on Thursday said the U.S. stands by the aircraft.

“The Osprey is a highly capable aircraft with an excellent operational safety record,” Pentagon press secretary George Little said.

But coming just as Washington and Tokyo were finalizing plans to send the first Ospreys to Okinawa — where the U.S. military footprint is always a sensitive political issue — the accidents could not have happened at a worse time.

In hopes of easing longstanding complaints that Okinawa bears too much of the burden of hosting the U.S. troops in Japan, the two governments in April announced that about 9,000 of the nearly 20,000 Marines there will be moved elsewhere.

Crowding around U.S. bases on Okinawa is particularly intense, and opponents of the bases often complain of the danger of accidents involving local residents, noise from training and base-related crime.

The dispute over the Ospreys has renewed those complaints.

“If the two governments force the deployment of these aircraft on Okinawa as scheduled, there will be an explosion of anger,” Kantoku Teraya, a national lawmaker from Okinawa, told reporters Wednesday after submitting a petition to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda calling for the deployment to be scrapped.

Okinawa’s governor has also said he opposes the deployment, and Iwakuni’s city assembly on Friday was expected to pass a nonbinding motion saying the accidents have caused “great worry to citizens and great confusion in the city.”

Local approval is not essential for the project to go ahead. But the fracas is an embarrassment for Japan’s central government, which after Friday’s talks in Washington will have to try to sell the plan anew to the host cities. Noda is scheduled to visit Okinawa on Saturday for a World War II memorial.

The $70 million Osprey is the U.S. military’s latest-generation transport aircraft.

It combines airplane-like wings with rotors that allow it to take off and land like a helicopter. Its engines roll forward in flight, allowing it to fly twice as fast as a standard helicopter. It has proven itself to be effective in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it got off to a bumpy start.

An early version of the Osprey crashed in 1991 and another crash killed seven the following year. In 2000, 19 Marines were killed when an Osprey crashed during a training exercise in Arizona, and a crash in North Carolina killed four Marines in December of that year.

In 2010, three service members and a civilian contractor were killed in the crash of an Air Force version of the aircraft in Afghanistan.

Last week, all five airmen aboard an Air Force CV-22 Osprey were hospitalized after their aircraft crashed in Florida on a training mission at Eglin Air Force Base. The cause in under investigation.

The crash at Eglin occurred just two months after a Marine Corps version of the aircraft, the MV-22 Osprey, went down during a training exercise in Morocco. Two Marines were killed and two others severely injured.

The Pentagon says it does not believe the cause of the crash was mechanical, and it has not grounded its Osprey fleet.

Japan - Govt suspends Osprey aircraft deployment

The government has decided to suspend procedures to deploy the U.S. MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft in the country until the cause and other details of a recent crash of a CV-22 Osprey aircraft, a remodeled version of the MV-22, are available.

Also behind the decision is increasing opposition to the Osprey deployment among people in Okinawa Prefecture following the latest crash of the CV-22 plane. The accident occurred in Florida during a routine drill on Wednesday night, injuring five crew members on board.

It now looks certain the CV-22 crash will cause a delay in the Japan-U.S. plan to deploy the MV-22 aircraft to the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, after a temporary deployment to the marine base in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, in July.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said at a press conference Thursday that Tokyo has asked the United States to investigate the details of the crash as quickly as possible.

"The Japanese government will take no further action [on the Osprey deployment] unless details [of the crash] are shared," he added.

In talks with U.S. Ambassador John Roos, Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto said, "The accident is very regrettable, and I hope the United States will provide as much information as possible about the incident."

The crash in Florida came on the heels of a series of accidents involving the Osprey aircraft, including a fatal crash in Morocco in April.

Noting the accident rate is very high for the Osprey, Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima told reporters, "The aircraft cannot be deployed in Okinawa."

Ginowan Mayor Atsushi Sakima also reiterated his stance against the deployment, saying the latest accident fueled his opposition. On Sunday, Ginowan is slated to hold a rally against the deployment.

Yamaguchi Gov. Sekinari Nii told Morimoto at their meeting in Tokyo that he wants the planned temporary MV-22 Osprey deployment at the Iwakuni base to be "shelved until the cause of the accident is fully investigated." The city of Iwakuni is also withholding its response to the central government's request for cooperation in the temporary deployment plan.

Given the growing anxieties over the MV-22 Osprey deployment among the local communities concerned, Fujimura said, "The government is well aware of local concerns about the safety of the aircraft and will try to sincerely explain the situation, including details of the latest accident."