Time magazine: V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame
On Oct 2, 9:58 am, Vince wrote:
Walt wrote:
On Oct 2, 2:48?am, Roger Conroy wrote:
BlackBeard wrote:
On Oct 1, 6:11 pm, Kerryn Offord wrote:
***
Maybe no more vulnerable to being shot at.. but the effect of being hit?
Although there are no perfect survivability systems out there, the
systems on the Osprey are 1) more numerous and 2) more advanced, than
the survivability systems on the CH-46
SNIP
If it has a cobra escort.. Well.. It loses it's altitude/ speed
advantage over alternative modern helicopters..
Rendevous scenario. The Cobras launch from a forward base and meet at
the LZ with the Osprey which has travelled from a base further away.
BB
Is the Cobra really the only possible escort?
I'm thinking that the AV-8 could do a pretty decent job during the
high speed transit phase.
Roger- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
AV-8's go too fast to really see what is on the ground. An AV-8 can't
supress a treeline the way a Cobra can.
I recall reading in the Marine Corps Gazette back in the early 1980's
what you've seen me post:
1. Doesn't matter what the range and speed of the V-22 is. It is
limited to the range and speed of the escorts
2. The V-22 needs guns of its own, and not one that fires backwards
either. If the rotors are tilted forward then no door gunner can get
a useful firing arc forward due to the arc of the rotors.
3. A chin turret was discussed (being the only reasonable option) but
that was eliminated due to cost.
I remember seeing this info in the MCG about 25 years ago.
The freaking thing is a grotesque boondoggle. It will never be
anything else.
I posted a video of a V-22 crash and some of the info I am posting now
on the website togetherweserved.com, which is for Marines only, and I
was banned within 24 hours.
Walt
The chin turret is not just a question of cost. It uses about 10-15% of
the already small payload and also "unbalances" the aircraft
Vince
The bucket made the cover of Time too.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/ar...665835,00.html
Wednesday, Sep. 26, 2007
V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame
By Mark Thompson
It's hard to imagine an American weapons program so fraught with
problems that Dick Cheney would try repeatedly to cancel it - hard,
that is, until you get to know the Osprey. As Defense Secretary under
George H.W. Bush, Cheney tried four times to kill the Marine Corps's
ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. Four times he failed. Cheney found the
arguments for the combat troop carrier unpersuasive and its problems
irredeemable. "Given the risk we face from a military standpoint,
given the areas where we think the priorities ought to be, the V-22 is
not at the top of the list," he told a Senate committee in 1989. "It
came out at the bottom of the list, and for that reason, I decided to
terminate it." But the Osprey proved impossible to kill, thanks to
lawmakers who rescued it from Cheney's ax time and again because of
the home-district money that came with it - and to the irresistible
notion that American engineers had found a way to improve on another
great aviation breakthrough, the helicopter.
Now the aircraft that flies like an airplane but takes off and lands
like a chopper is about to make its combat debut in Iraq. It has been
a long, strange trip: the V-22 has been 25 years in development, more
than twice as long as the Apollo program that put men on the moon.
V-22 crashes have claimed the lives of 30 men - 10 times the lunar
program's toll - all before the plane has seen combat. The Pentagon
has put $20 billion into the Osprey and expects to spend an additional
$35 billion before the program is finished. In exchange, the Marines,
Navy and Air Force will get 458 aircraft, averaging $119 million per
copy.
The saga of the V-22 - the battles over its future on Capitol Hill, a
performance record that is spotty at best, a long, determined quest by
the Marines to get what they wanted - demonstrates how Washington
works (or, rather, doesn't). It exposes the compromises that are made
when narrow interests collide with common sense. It is a tale that
shows how the system fails at its most significant task, by placing in
jeopardy those we count on to protect us. For even at a stratospheric
price, the V-22 is going into combat shorthanded. As a result of
decisions the Marine Corps made over the past decade, the aircraft
lacks a heavy-duty, forward-mounted machine gun to lay down
suppressing fire against forces that will surely try to shoot it down.
And if the plane's two engines are disabled by enemy fire or
mechanical trouble while it's hovering, the V-22 lacks a helicopter's
ability to coast roughly to the ground - something that often saved
lives in Vietnam. In 2002 the Marines abandoned the requirement that
the planes be capable of autorotating (as the maneuver is called),
with unpowered but spinning helicopter blades slowly letting the
aircraft land safely. That decision, a top Pentagon aviation
consultant wrote in a confidential 2003 report obtained by TIME, is
"unconscionable" for a wartime aircraft. "When everything goes wrong,
as it often does in a combat environment," he said, "autorotation is
all a helicopter pilot has to save his and his passengers' lives."
The Plane That Wouldn't Die
In many ways, the V-22 is a classic example of how large weapons
systems have been built in the U.S. since Dwight Eisenhower warned in
1961 of the "unwarranted influence" of "the military-industrial
complex." The Osprey has taken years to design, build, test and bring
to the field. All that time meant plenty of money for its prime
contractors, Bell Helicopter and the Boeing Co. As the plane took
shape and costs increased, some of its missions were shelved or
sidelined. And yet, with the U.S. spending almost $500 billion a year
on defense - not counting the nearly $200 billion annually for
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan - there's plenty of money for
marginal or unnecessary programs. Pentagon reform and efficiency are
far less of a cause among lawmakers today than during the years of
Ronald Reagan's comparatively modest defense-spending boom. "Almost
every program the U.S. military is now buying takes longer to develop,
costs more than predicted and usually doesn't meet the original
specifications and requirements," says Gordon Adams, who oversaw
military spending for the Office of Management and Budget during Bill
Clinton's Administration.
The Marine Corps likes to boast that it spends only a nickel out of
every Pentagon dollar and makes do with cheaper weapons than the other
services. The story of the V-22 belies that image: It's a tale of how
a military service with little experience overseeing aircraft programs
has wound up with a plane that may be as notable for its shortcomings
as for its technological advances.
First, some history. Because Marines deploy aboard ships, the
service's chiefs have always hungered for vertical lift - aircraft
that could take off and land from small decks and fly far inland to
drop off combat-ready troops. As the Marines' Vietnam-era CH-46
choppers became obsolete, commanders started to dream of an aircraft
that would give them more options when considering an amphibious
assault. The dreams intensified following the failed Desert One
mission in 1980 to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. In the course of the
operation, three helicopters broke down, leading to an order to abort
the entire endeavor, and a fourth chopper collided with a C-130
aircraft at a desert base, killing eight U.S. troops. That sent
Pentagon bureaucrats hunting for a transport that could be used by all
four military services and prevent another fiasco. Reagan, who took
office the year after Desert One, began to pour money into the
Pentagon, particularly for research and design into new weapons and
combat systems. The Osprey was born.
Originally, the program was designed to churn out the first of more
than 1,000 tilt-rotors in less than 10 years for $40 million each. But
this was no conventional plane. The Osprey may cruise like an
airplane, but it takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter. The
technical challenge of rotating an airplane's wings and engines in
midair led to delays, which in turn led to an ever higher price tag.
As expenses rose, the Pentagon cut the number of planes it wanted to
buy, which in turn increased the unit price. Citing rising costs, the
Army abandoned the project in 1983.
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."
Faced with killing the program - or possibly killing those aboard the
V-22 - the Marines have opted to save the plane and have largely
shifted responsibility for surviving such a catastrophe from the
designers to the pilots. While the engineers spent years vainly trying
to solve the problem, pilots aboard a stricken V-22 will have just
seconds to react. But tellingly, pilots have never practiced the
maneuver outside the simulator - the flight manual forbids it - and
even in simulators the results have been less than reassuring. "In
simulations," the flight manual warns, "the outcome of the landings
varied widely due to the extreme sensitivity to pilot technique and
timing." The director of the Pentagon's testing office, in a 2005
report, put it more bluntly. If power is lost when a V-22 is flying
like a helicopter below 1,600 ft. (490 m), he said, emergency landings
"are not likely to be survivable."
The Pea-Shooter Problem
While the aerodynamics of autorotation may be challenging for
outsiders to grasp, a second decision - sending the V-22 into combat
armed with only a tiny gun, pointing backward - is something anyone
can understand. The Pentagon boasts on its V-22 website that the
aircraft "will be the weapon of choice for the full spectrum of
combat." That's plainly false - and by a long shot. Retired General
James Jones, who recently led a study into the capabilities of the
Iraqi security forces, is a V-22 supporter. But when he ran the
Marines from 1999 to 2003, he insisted the plane be outfitted with a
hefty, forward-aimed .50-cal. machine gun. "It's obviously technically
feasible. We've got nose-mounted guns on [helicopter gunship] Cobras
and other flying platforms, and I thought all along this one should
have it too," he says.
The Marines saluted, awarding a $45 million contract in 2000 for the
development of a swiveling triple-barreled .50-cal. machine gun under
the V-22's nose, automatically aimed through a sight in the co-pilot's
helmet. "All production aircraft will be outfitted with this defensive
weapons system," the Marine colonel in charge of the program pledged
in 2000. The weapon "provides the V-22 with a strong defensive
firepower capability to greatly increase the aircraft's survivability
in hostile actions," the Bell-Boeing team said. But the added weight
(1,000 lbs., or 450 kg) and cost ($1.5 million per V-22) ultimately
pushed the gun into the indefinite future.
So 10 V-22s are going to war this month, each with just a lone, small
7.62-mm machine gun mounted on its rear ramp. The gun's rounds are
about the same size as a .30-06 hunting rifle's, and it is capable of
firing only where the V-22 has been - not where it's going - and only
when the ramp used by Marines to get on and off the aircraft is
lowered. That doesn't satisfy Jones. "I just fundamentally believe
than an assault aircraft that goes into hot landing zones should have
a nose-mounted gun," Jones told TIME. "I go back to my roots a little
bit," the Vietnam veteran says. "I just like those kinds of airplanes
to have the biggest and best gun we can get, and that to me was a
requirement." He doesn't think much of the V-22's current weapon: "A
rear-mounted gun is better than no gun at all, but I don't know how
much better."
The Marines say combat jets or helicopter gunships will shadow V-22s
flying into dangerous areas. And backers say the V-22's speed will
help it elude threats. It could, for example, zip into harm's way at
more than 200 m.p.h. (320 km/h), convert to helicopter mode and then
land within seconds. It could pause on the ground to deliver or pick
up Marines and then hustle from the landing zone. Various missile-
warning systems and fire-extinguishing gear bolster its survivability.
If it is hit, redundant hydraulic and flight-control systems will help
keep it airborne. Finally, Marines say, if the V-22 does crash, its
crumpling fuselage and collapsing seats will help cushion those on
board.
It's good that such protection is there. It's needed. For the V-22
continues to suffer problems unusual in an aircraft that first flew in
1989. In March 2006, for example, a just-repaired V-22 with three
people aboard unexpectedly took off on its own - apparently the result
of a computer glitch. After a 3?sec. flight to an altitude of 6 ft.
(about 2 m), according to the V-22's flight computer, or 25 ft. (about
8 m), according to eyewitnesses, it dropped to the ground with enough
force to snap off its right wing and cause more than $1 million in
damage.
There's more. Critics have had long-standing concerns about the poor
field of view for pilots, the cramped and hot quarters for passengers
and the V-22's unusually high need for maintenance. A flawed computer
chip that could have led to crashes forced a V-22 grounding in
February; bad switches that could have doomed the aircraft surfaced in
June. In March the Government Accountability Office warned that V-22s
are rolling off the production line in Amarillo, Texas, and being
accepted by the Marines "with numerous deviations and waivers,"
including "several potentially serious defects." An internal Marine
memo warned in June that serious and persistent reliability issues
could "significantly" reduce the aircraft's anticipated role in Iraq.
V-22s built before 2005, the report said, are fully ready to fly only
35% of the time, while newer models, like those in Iraq, are 62%
ready. But "sustained high-tempo operations in [Iraq]," the memo
warns, could drive down the readiness rates for the newer V-22s.
Into Iraq
Soon enough, the marines will know if those warnings are on target.
"My fervent desire is to get the V-22 into the fight as soon as we
can," General James Conway, commandant of the Marines, said in March.
"I think it's going to prove itself rapidly." But then he said
something that stunned V-22 boosters: "I'll tell you, there is going
to be a crash. That's what airplanes do over time." Conway is not
alone. Ward Carroll, the top government spokesman for the V-22 program
from 2002 to 2005, believes that six Ospreys, about 5% of the fleet,
will crash during its first three years of operational flight. Carroll
says new pilots flying at night and in bad weather will make mistakes
with tragic consequences. So he's reserving judgment on the aircraft
and suspects that many of those who will be climbing into the V-22 are
too. "I'm still not convinced," he says - echoing comments made
privately by some Marines - "that the Marine ground pounders are in
love with this airplane."
A former F-14 aviator, Carroll likens the V-22 to another Marine
favorite, the AV-8 Harrier jump jet. "The Harrier," he notes, "is
actually a good analogy for the V-22." Like the AV-8, the V-22 is a
radical aircraft crammed with compromises that may change combat
forever. And like the AV-8, it may also kill a lot of Marines while
doing little of note on the battlefield. Since 1971, more than a third
of Harriers have crashed, killing 45 Marines in 143 accidents. But
there's a critical difference between the two warplanes. Each Harrier
carries a single pilot, nestled into an ejection seat with a
parachute. But after all the debate about tilt-rotor technology -
after all the vested interests have argued their case and all its
boosters and critics have had their say - this much we know: within
days, a V-22 will begin carrying up to 26 Marines into combat in Iraq,
with no ejection seats - and no parachutes.
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