At theJune 12 hearingof the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee investigating the safety of the V-22 Osprey, members of Gold Star families were sitting in the front row, holding framed photographs of loved ones lost in a recent crash.
Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Glenn Grothman (R-WI) opened the hearing by noting the revolutionary tiltrotor aircraft, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, has been plagued with multiple deadly crashes since its initial testing more than two decades ago.
“These incidences have earned the Osprey the troubled nickname ‘Widowmaker,’” Grothman said before reading from a statement from widows and family members whose lives were shattered by the 2022 crash of a Marine Corps Osprey during routine flight operations.
“We seek accountability, answers, and change. Our goal isn’t to see this platform removed,” wrote Amber Sax of California, widow of Marine Capt. John Sax. “It’s to know that someday, we will be able to say their lives enabled others to live. Knowing what happened to them won’t ever be repeated.”
Early in its development, the Osprey suffered its worst accident when a fully loaded V-22 crashed at the Marana, Arizona, airport, killing all 19 Marines on board.
The cause of the 2000 crash, a phenomenon called vortex ring state common to helicopters, was corrected by software fixes and training improvements, and by the time V-22 was declared operational in 2007, its safety record had improved, on par with other combat and transport aircraft.
But just over two years ago, bad things began to happen with alarming frequency.
Twenty U.S. Marine and Air Force personnel died in four V-22 accidents over a 20-month period.
“In March of 2022, a Marine Corps V-22 Osprey assigned to Marine medium tiltrotor squadron 261 crashed during a training flight in Norway, killing four Marines. In June of 2022, five U.S. Marines from Camp Pendleton were killed during a routine flight operation in California,” recounted Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), who has flown on the Osprey many times as a member of Congress.
“In August of 2023, three Marines from Marine rotational force Darwin, a force that I traveled to Darwin, Australia, and met with,were killed in an Osprey crash in Australia. And in November of 2023, a U.S. Air Force Osprey carrying eight airmen assigned to Yokota Air Base and Kadena Air Base crashed off the southern coast of Japan during a routine training mission, killing all eight service members on board,” Lynch continued with the grim list of deadly accidents.
“Look, I understand the value of this aircraft,” he concluded. “I understand that and the need to move personnel quickly, but this repeated drumbeat of fatalities is totally unacceptable.”
After the latest accident in November, the entire fleet of 434 V-22s across the Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Japanese military were grounded for four months.
The officer who made that decision was Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, commander of Naval Air Systems Command, who was in the hot seat for most of the contentious hearing.
In December, Chebi said, he was presented with data from safety investigators that the V-22 “had experienced a catastrophic material failure that we have never seen before.”
“Based on that data,” he testified, “I made the decision to ground all V-22s until we understood the failure mode and we could safely return the aircraft to flight.”
Marine Corps V-22s have since resumed flying, with limits on how far they can be from a safe landing zone in case something goes wrong.
So now Osprey is not certified to conduct primary missions, which include transporting troops in combat zones and resupplying aircraft carriers at sea — and likely won’t be for another year.
A malfunctioning clutch assembly, which was the proximate cause of the 2022 accident, is being redesigned after it was determined the clutches in V-22s were wearing out much faster than expected, and a comprehensive review is underway to figure out a solution to the unspecified “catastrophic material failure,” Chebi cited in his testimony.
“We are methodically looking at material and nonmaterial changes that we can make to allow for a full mission set,” Chebi assured the committee. “I will not certify the V-22 to return to unrestricted flight operations until I am satisfied that we have sufficiently addressed the issues.”
The U.S. military insists V-22’s revolutionary tiltrotor technology is vital to the demands of modern warfare, giving the Osprey the capability to fly faster and higher than helicopters, the lift capacity to deliver heavy F-35 jet engines to aircraft carriers and smaller assault ships, and the lifesaving ability to exfiltrate troops under fire in places where helicopters can’t land.
But frustrated lawmakers are threatening to pull the plug on the program, which is only halfway through its production run, and ditch the V-22, which was not planned to be retired until at least 2050.
“I get it. It is expensive, halfway through the lifecycle. But if we can’t get it right, at some point, we have to acknowledge we just can’t get it right,” said Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), a former Army helicopter pilot and retired brigadier general. “This thing shouldn’t fly because it’s too dangerous.”
“It’s awesome to look at when it’s working right. It’s awesome. But it’s not working right enough to accept,” Perry said.
“If another Osprey goes down, we’re done. This program’s done. So, why don’t we ground this now?” Lynch warned. “Ground this now,” he implored. “Don’t allow any other brave Marine or airman to go down in one of these aircraft.”
“The V-22 has always gotten a bad rap,” said aviation writer Richard Whittle, author of the 2010 bookThe Dream Machine: The untold history of the notorious V-22 Osprey. “It’s an ugly duckling that actually has been a bit of a swan if you look at its record objectively.”
The safety of military aircraft is measured by the rate of Class A mishaps incurred for every 100,000 hours of flight. A Class A mishap is defined as an accident that involves loss of life or significant damage to the aircraft.
The mishap rate for the V-22 is 4.1 per 100,000 hours overall and 3.3 for the Marine Corps version. Compared to other aircraft flown by the services, the rate is slightly lower for the Navy and slightly higher for the Marine Corps and Air Force.
But a single high-impact accident can skew the numbers, and it’s not just the V-22 that has seen its accident rate climb in recent years as budgets have been cut and flying hours reduced.
“In military aircraft across the board, safety and readiness metrics are dropping,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) noted at the hearing. “So far this year, Army aircraft have experienced twice the rate of major incidents than any year in the last decade. Air Force major incidents hit a five-year high in fiscal 2023.”
“The accident rate for the V-22 is basically average. In some years, the Osprey has been the safest rotorcraft that the Marine Corps flies,” said Whittle, who argues the V-22 should not be judged solely on lives lost in accidents but also by lives saved in combat.
“It’s lived up to its promise on rescue missions. It has saved hundreds and maybe thousands of lives,” he said, noting a V-22 Osprey has never been shot down by hostile fire.
“June 1, 2010, two Ospreys flew 400 miles from Kandahar into the Hindu Kush mountains and landed on a mountain at 15,000 feet and brought back 32 troops whose aircraft had gone down, who were under fire from the Taliban, and who hadn’t been able to be rescued by helicopters or ground troops,” Whittle said.
“There are many examples of how the Osprey has saved many, many, many lives,” he said and went on to cite others.
“On Jan. 7, 2020, after Trump ordered the drone strike that killed the leader of the Iranian Quds Force [Qassem Soleimani], they got a warning that the Iranians were going to hit Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. The Ospreys flew in there and whisked out 194 special operations troops before 10 Iranian ballistic missiles hit the airfield,” he said.
Whittle said the V-22’s reputation as a “widowmaker” is an unfounded media myth.
“Every time there’s an Osprey crash, there’s this drumbeat of nonsense about how this is a cursed aircraft, and it’s been flawed from the start. It’s just not true,” Whittle said.
In aDefense Oneopinion essaypublished in February, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Steve Busby, former commanding general of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, argued that the “perception that the Osprey unnecessarily places service members’ lives at risk isafallacyresulting fromgroupthink,” pointing to the data he said show “the V-22’s safety record is not an unusual outlier.”
Busby cited the record of the workhorse Black Hawk helicopter, used by all the services for more than 40 years, and in which 970 people have died in 390 incidents, with 60 deaths occurring over the past 10 years.
Military helicopters fly many more hours than V-22s, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the point Busby makes is that military aviation is an inherently dangerous endeavor, and it would be a mistake to give up on tiltrotor technology that provides unmatched capability and performance.
“Bottom line, V-22 Ospreys provide warfighting commanders operational lethality,mission-flexibility, and surprisethey needthroughthe application of tiltrotor’s superior speed, range, payload,and survivability,” he wrote.
The Army has just picked a tiltrotor replacement for the Black Hawk, the Bell V-280 Valor,a speedy, long-range assault aircraft that looks pretty much like a mini-V-22.
“It can’t come fast enough for me,” Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in May. “I think this is going to be game-changing … the range it’s going to have, the speed it’s going to have, manned-unmanned teaming … all the other things that are going to come with this.”
But George got immediate pushback from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who complained the bid for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft submitted by Sikorsky, which happens to be located in his state, was half of the cost of the Bell contract and relied on a more conventional helicopter design.
“Ithink we’ve made a really bad bet on doubling down on tiltrotor technology that has proved to be deadly and has proved to be wildly expensive,” Murphy said. “They were 99% certain that the problem had been fixed, and then there were four crashes where 20 more service members died. Costs per flying hour have spiked by 22% just between 2019 and 2020. And so, the decision … sounds disastrous.”
“If he’d look back at the history of aviation and look at the crash rates of first-generation aircraft, he’d be shocked at how many people died in the first versions of various aircraft,” Whittle said of Murphy’s criticism.
“The Osprey is the first tiltrotor put into production. It’s only the third tiltrotor ever designed. The new V-280 will learn lessons from the Osprey and is going to be a much better, probably much safer aircraft, period,” he said.
“I think the military ought to be buying more tiltrotors. They ought to be designing more smaller, useful tiltrotors like gunships and medevac aircraft,” Whittle said. “But there’s this myth out there that this is dangerous technology. It really isn’t.”
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But lawmakers, seeking more transparency from the Pentagon, remain skeptical.
“It’s one thing to lose somebody in combat, but to lose somebody in a noncombat situation should be almost inexcusable. And it’s something that you never see in the private sector,” Grothman said as he gaveled his hearing to a close. “It always bothers me, and I think there’s something wrong with it.”
