A V-22 flies over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina.
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That left the relatively tiny Marine Corps footing most of the bill for the project-- the V-22 accounts for nearly 70% of its procurement budget--and overseeing a program larger and more technically challenging than any the service was accustomed to managing. Sensing weakness at the Pentagon, congressional supporters, largely from the V-22's key manufacturing states of Texas (Bell Helicopter) and Pennsylvania (Boeing), created the Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition to keep the craft alive, despite Cheney's opposition. They were aided by nearly 2,000 V-22 suppliers, in more than 40 states, who pressured their lawmakers to stick with the program. And so, despite Cheney's doubts, the Osprey survived.
By 1993, as the Osprey program approached its 12th birthday and Bill Clinton became President, the Marines had spent $13 billion on the planes. None were ready for war. In 1991 one of the first V-22s crashed when taking off for its maiden flight--because of improper wiring. A second crash killed seven in 1992. The Clinton Pentagon stuck with the program through the 1990s, but in 2000 two more V-22s crashed, killing 23 Marines. With that, the Marines grounded the Osprey for 18 months
Probes into the deadly 2000 crashes revealed that in a rush to deploy the aircraft, the Marines had dangerously cut corners in their testing program. The number of different flight configurations--varying speed, weight and other factors--flown by test pilots to ensure safe landings was reduced by half to meet deadlines. Then only two-thirds of those curtailed flight tests were conducted. That trend continues: while a 2004 plan called for 131 hours of nighttime flight tests, the Marines managed to run only 33 on the Osprey. Why the shortcuts? Problems with a gearbox kept many V-22s and pilots grounded. That meant many pilots lacked the hours required to qualify for night flying. Similarly, sea trials were curtailed because the ship designated to assist with Osprey tests could spare only 10 of the 21 days needed.
There's also been controversy over a sandstorm test for the craft. The V-22's tendency to generate a dust storm when it lands in desert-like terrain wasn't examined because "an unusually wet spring resulted in a large amount of vegetation that prevented severe brownouts during landing attempts," the Pentagon's top tester noted. But the program continued, albeit with a caution about the aircraft's ability to fly in dusty conditions.
The Engine-Failure Problem
After the 2000 grounding, Osprey pilots were told to fly less aggressively, which critics say is the only reason no V-22 has crashed since. "They keep talking about all the things it can do, but little by little its operations are being more and more restricted," says Philip Coyle, who monitored the V-22's development as the Pentagon's top weapons tester from 1994 to 2001. The V-22 can fly safely "if used like a truck, carrying people from one safe area to another safe area," he says. "But I don't see them using it in combat situations where they will have to do a lot of maneuvering."
The Marines contend that the V-22 is an assault aircraft and that no pilot who finds himself dodging bullets is going to fly it gently. "The airplane is incredibly maneuverable," says Lieut. Colonel Anthony (Buddy) Bianca, a veteran V-22 pilot. But the dirty little secret about an aircraft that combines the best features of an airplane and a helicopter is that it combines their worst features too. The V-22 can't glide as well as an airplane, and it can't hover as well as a helicopter. If a V-22 loses power while flying like an airplane, it should be able to glide to a rough but survivable belly-flop landing. Its huge, 19-ft.-long (5.7 m) rotors are designed to rip into shreds rather than break apart and tear into the fuselage. But all bets are off if a V-22 is flying like a helicopter, heading in or out of a landing zone, and its engines are disabled by enemy fire or mechanical malfunction.
As originally designed, the V-22 was supposed to survive a loss of engine power when flying like a helicopter by autorotating toward the ground, just as maple seeds do in the fall. Autorotation, which turns a normally soft touchdown into an very hard emergency landing, is at least survivable. It became clear, however, that the design of the Osprey, adjusted many times over, simply could not accommodate the maneuver. The Pentagon slowly conceded the point. "The lack of proven autorotative capability is cause for concern in tilt-rotor aircraft," a 1999 report warned. Two years later, a second study cautioned that the V-22's "probability of a successful autorotational landing ... is very low." Unable to rewrite the laws of physics, the Pentagon determined that the ability to perform the safety procedure was no longer a necessary requirement and crossed it off the V-22's must-have list. "An autorotation to a safe landing is no longer a formal requirement," a 2002 Pentagon report said. "The deletion of safe autorotation landing as a ... requirement recognizes the hybrid nature of the tilt-rotor."
Indeed it does, but that doesn't make the aircraft any safer. The plane's backers said that the chance of a dual-engine failure was so rare that it shouldn't be of concern. Yet the flight manual lists a variety of things that can cause both engines to fail, including "contaminated fuel ... software malfunctions or battle damage." The lone attempted V-22 autorotation "failed miserably," according to an internal 2003 report, obtained by Time, written by the Institute for Defense Analyses, an in-house Pentagon think tank. "The test data indicate that the aircraft would have impacted the ground at a ... fatal rate of descent."
That prospect doesn't concern some V-22 pilots, who believe they'll have the altitude and time to convert the aircraft into its airplane mode and hunt for a landing strip if they lose power. "We can turn it into a plane and glide it down, just like a C-130," Captain Justin (Moon) McKinney, a V-22 pilot, said from his North Carolina base as he got ready to head to Iraq. "I have absolutely no safety concerns with this aircraft, flying it here or in Iraq."
Helicopter expert Rex Rivolo, who called the decision to deploy the V-22 without proven autorotation capability "unconscionable" in that confidential 2003 Pentagon study, declined to be interviewed. But in his report, Rivolo noted that up to 90% of the helicopters lost in the Vietnam War were in their final approach to landing when they were hit by enemy ground fire. About half of those were able to autorotate safely to the ground, "thereby saving the crews," Rivolo wrote. "Such events in V-22 would all be fatal."