Japan's Miyazaki Airport Reopens After Closing Due To World War II Bomb Explosion

Illustration of the JAL aircraft preparing to take off at Miyazaki Airport. (Wikimedia Commons/Yamaguchi Yoshiaki)

JAKARTA - Miyazaki Airport in southwest Japan resumed operations on Thursday morning, a day after an unexploded World War II-era bomb exploded on the runway and forced more than 80 flights to be canceled.

The Japanese Airlines plane to Fukuoka departed at around 7:40 a.m. local time, the first flight since the airport closed on Wednesday to investigate the incident and repair the runway after the explosion left a 7-meter-wide and 1 meter-deep hole, reported by Kyodo News Oct. 4.

Flights are expected to operate normally again, except for flights that do not have aircraft.

Previously, the explosion occurred shortly before 8 a.m. on Wednesday, without any injuries being reported.

Video footage from the Civil Aviation College, which uses the airport as a pilot training base, shows clouds of black dust and debris billowing just two minutes after an airplane passed nearby.

Japan's Land Self-Defense Forces said the explosives were a 250 kilogram bomb from World War II and were investigating how the explosion occurred. The Japanese government said on Wednesday a US-made bomb was the cause of the explosion.

After the incident, asphalt debris was scattered within a radius of about 200 meters, including the runway, according to the Ministry of Transportation's office at Miyazaki Airport.

In total, four aircraft for domestic flights have used the runway shortly before the explosion.

It is known that the airport, which used to be the airbase of the Japanese Empire Navy, was often affected by the discovery of an unexploded US bomb from World War II. Two similar bombs were found at the airport in 2011 and another in 2021.