TOKYO, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) on Friday conducted test-flights for two Osprey aircraft at a camp east of Tokyo amid continued safety concerns and staunch public opposition.
The test flights will continue over the next few days at the GSDF Camp Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture close to Tokyo, with the planes, that can take off and land like a helicopter and fly like a fixed-wing plane, having their operational scope expanded next week.
Local media reported that outside the Kisarazu camp, a group of residents held a rally to protest the test flights of the controversial planes.
"We don't need Ospreys in Japan's sky," one protestor's banner read. "If more Ospreys are deployed, they will fly everywhere and destroy our lives with their noise," said the head of one protest group, as reported by local media.
The government plans to deploy 17 of the U.S.-made planes through July 2025. Thereafter, they will be based at an airport in southwestern Japan's Saga Prefecture.
The move to Saga would have happened far earlier were it not for staunch local government and public opposition to the fleet being based there.
The opposition to the Osprey's in Japan comes from issues of noise, but more pertinently to those of safety.
Among a litany of global accidents and mishaps connected to the aircraft, with some of them being fatal, a U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey made an emergency landing in Japan's Oita Prefecture, on the eastern coast of Kyushu, in August 2017, with a similar plane making a crash-landing off Nago in Okinawa in December 2016.
One of the turboprop planes based in Japan was also involved in a fatal crash off the coast of Australia in August 2017 that killed three personnel aboard. Enditem
