Construction on Mageshima Island, seen here in October 2023, has been delayed three years, with a new expected completion date of 2030. (Wikimedia Commons)
TOKYO — Construction of a new Japanese air base that will serve as a training site for U.S. Navy pilots is three years behind schedule, according to Japan’s Ministry of Defense.
The ministry has pushed the construction deadline for a new base on Mageshima, about 20 miles south of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, from 2027 to 2030, the Kumamoto Defense Branch Office said in a news release Tuesday.
Rough seas and strong winds have delayed supply deliveries to the island, while the Jan. 1 earthquake in Noto prefecture contributed to significant shortages of supplies and manpower, a spokesman for the Kumamoto Defense Branch Office said by phone Friday. Also, he said, the earthen fill material excavated on the island for the project proved unsuitable.
The government began work on the base in January 2023, with total construction costs expected to be about $1.6 billion.
The Kumamoto branch office, a local arm of the Defense Ministry, did not respond to a Stars and Stripes’ phone query by Friday afternoon.
Provisionally named Mageshima Base, the new facility was planned to address a shortage of military installations in the region and act as a training area for U.S. pilots preparing to deploy on aircraft carriers, according to the ministry’s website.
Navy pilots routinely undergo field carrier-landing practice ahead of a carrier deployment.
Pilots with Carrier Air Wing 5, the air complement to the carrier strike group headquartered at Yokosuka Naval Base, and soon to embark on the carrier USS George Washington, usually train at Iwo Jima, nearly 850 miles southeast of their home at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni.
During the training, pilots fly numerous day and night sorties and complete touch-and-goes that simulate takeoff and landing conditions aboard an aircraft carrier.
While the air wing has trained for decades on Iwo Jima, also known as Iwo To, the Navy has considered the island unsuitable as a permanent training location due to difficulty in maintaining its remote facilities and a lack of alternate landing fields.
In the event of bad weather, landing practice is moved to other U.S. airfields in Japan, such as the Yokota and Misawa air bases, but local communities often object to the noise created by those flights.
After promising to find an alternative location, the Japanese government in November 2019 purchased Mageshima for about $113 million from the island’s majority owner Taston Airport, a Tokyo-based development company, Asahi reported at the time.
Plans for Mageshima Base call for about 200 personnel permanently stationed on the island. They and their families will live on Tanegashima, just 7 miles east of Mageshima, according to the ministry’s website.
The base will have two runways, docks, an air traffic control tower, storage areas, hangars and barracks, according to layout plans released by the ministry.
