The US Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have grounded their fleet of Boeing-Bell-made Osprey V-22s on safety grounds.
A spokesperson for the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) told The Register that the decision had been made following an incident where one of the aircraft made an emergency landing.
...The move comes after a V-22, operating out of the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) in Florida, was forced to make a "precautionary landing," its spokesperson told us. No one was injured in the incident.
The decision comes barely a year after the last grounding of the V-22 fleet, which came after a fatal crash by a V-22 operated by the Air Force which killed both pilots and six passengers. The cause of that crash was reportedly one of the two engines failed, and the fleet was grounded for three months of checks.
The V-22 is too complex and too expensive, and keeps killing its passengers.
13 comments:
That plane has NEVER been right! It's cool to watch in flight. You just sit there and say "How does that thing fly???" Apparently Boeing sits there and says the same thing...
This is why the Army is getting the Bell V-280 Valor.
Because buying new, upgraded, modern, ordinary helicopters, is too cost effective, efficient and doesn't enrich the Crony Capitalist, oligarchs enough. Also, ordinary helos don't kill enough people.
It's a helicopter flying sideways...sigh
And nobody is even shooting at it.
Rode in one ONCE in Iraq.
Scariest damned thing EVAR!
It took off... just like a VERY LOUD Blackhawk or Chinook... EXCEPTIONALLY loud. VERY 'rattle-y' A slight up angle, gently in a hover... at first.
THEN: When it transitioned to 'Airplane Mode' or whatever they call it? OMFG it made every single roller coaster I've ever been on seem tame by comparison... Full on ROCKET MODE!!!! Utterly terrifying TBH and after that?
There were a couple of other movements I had in and around the AOR on that tour, that when I found out that the flight was an Osprey? Yeah... HARD PASS and I'd wait (even if it meant a day or two extra) for the next birdd.
Pisser for HMX-1, which flies some highly modified Ospreys as the POTUS pick-up birds on the WH lawn. They'll have to dust off the old vintage 60-year-old Sikorsky VH-3Ds UFN, or else POTUS' first leg of any trip will be by ground limo to Andrews AFB.
Oh, and anyone griping about the Osprey never took a ride in a rattletrap "vintage" 1950s CH-46 that still had Vietnamese beer can patches in the hull from the 1960s.
That would be like taking the troops for a spin in the Wright Flyer - in 1953.
The vehicles the Osprey replaced were aircraft in name only, all were older than their pilots, most were older than their squadron commanders, and the vast majority were nothing but a collection of aircraft parts travelling in a loose formation, on their best day, with the most vital piece of gear carried onboard being the crew chief's bag of kitty litter, used to soak up any dozen puddles of oil, grease, and hydraulic fluid randomly appearing in any such bird, after anything over two minutes' running time.
That they flew at all was more a testament to the prayers of the Chaplain Corps than to the ministrations of the maintenance detachments.
I would need to see accident statistics from this and other aircraft. Probably helos but since this is a hybrid perhaps some fixed wing as well. Harriers?
The 2023 crash off of Okinawa was based on the failure of the pilot to follow the procedure to land after repeated chip burn warning activations, where he continued to fly until the gearbox failed, after multiple warning alarms in the previous half hour. If you drove your car after the oil pressure read zero, the dash lit up with low oil pressure lights and the engine sounded rough then you blame the manufacturer? The Osprey may be a complex machine but it does not fall out of the sky like the fighter jets of the 50's and 60's did.
You wouldn't think that with all the bad press that this thing has garnered it would actually be one of the safest military aircraft currently flying. The MAJOR problem seems to be that any failure is of a catastrophic nature, with the loss of most or all of the occupants.
The two pilots of the Japanese crash were supremely stupid. The PIC for ignoring the transmission warnings, and the co-pilot for not shooting him when he failed to respond appropriately to the second warning.
All I have to say is that I have some inside knowledge about the manufacture of this aircraft and I would not go anywhere near it.
Only about 50 years to late
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