[Auth. note: AMST-15 has necessary background.]
As of November 2023, 16 V-22 Ospreys have been damaged beyond repair in accidents that have killed a total of 62 people. Four of the crashes occurred during developmental flight tests; these killed a total of 30 people from 1991 to 2000. Since the V-22 became operational in 2007, 12 crashes and several other accidents and incidents have killed a total of 32 people.
I’m not certain that this (or any) Wikipedia article is 100% correct on V-22 accidents, but for my purposes it’s close enough that you can get a sense of the goings-on with this airframe. My own story with the V-22, however, really runs from the 90s through the early aughts (‘92-01). I mentioned before that a college ROTC friend of mine was standing in formation and watched the 1992 Osprey fatal mishap over the Potomac, so I already had an eyewitness account of the Osprey’s early troubles. Then there was my 1993 rebuffed question to DCS Air about how the Osprey would fit into the Marine Corps’ entire aviation suite, viz. how the hell are we going to escort these planes-cum-helicopter things into hot LZs?
But in mid-1995, my “big brother” in the Marine Corps - college friend and ice hockey teammate, the guy who walked me around our squadron at Flight School, who was at 29 Palms when I crashed, who lived down the street from us in base housing, etc… Jeff “Stinky” Prowse told me that he had put in a package to be one of the first 46 pilots to transition to the Osprey. Yes, the very same guy I mentioned in one of these missives for his advice to me: “Never select a brand new aircraft, or you’ll be one of the guys working out the bugs whether you want to or not.” But his enthusiasm for the promise of the technology was genuine and palpable, which is really just another another example of how good the Marine Corps is at propaganda - even against those who know better. I made the requisite objection, then supported my brother. And prayed alone.
It’s a nice Cockpit.
After he’d gone through the syllabus and become ensconced in the new VMMT-204 spaces, he took me for a simulator ride in the Osprey simulator. So, yes, I actually have flown in one - at least the simulation of one. Of course CH-46 guys loved the Osprey - it had a glass cockpit like a commercial airliner, complete integrated avionics suite, state-of-the-art navigation, you name it. Phrog Bubbas were helicopter pilots who had been flying a 1950s airframe, coaxing that pig into the air on willpower and misdirection, folding and refolding their maps on their kneeboards, and using their non-directional beacon and radio for instrument approaches in their old syllabus. Of course they were thrilled to be flying the new shiny thing; they’d been piloting an Edsel for the last several decades. The V-22 transition also brought them back to their fixed-wing roots in naval aviation, so it wasn’t that hard a transition. The “Blottle” - combination throttle and collective? It wasn’t awful, but something about all of it made me think this was not going to work out well.
Of course, I departed in 1996 for law school, then came the Bar exam, Naval Justice School, and finally swearing in as an attorney, then the fam and I get orders to Okinawa, Japan. My first assignment as a judge advocate is as a criminal defense attorney. After two summers interning as a prosecutor, including in the Aviano Cable Car mishap trial, I have to admit that it is a blow - a deep, philosophical dread fills me. How will I defend some guilty bastard?? At the time, I am a faithful “Law and Order” viewer and I am certain that I am destined to be the Good Guy, riding in on a White Horse to Dispense Justice and Shoot the Bad Guy in the Face, and at Least See Him Off to the Pokey.
My tour winds up being cut short to one-year because one of our daughters has some pediatric GI problems; nothing that’s terribly serious, but military medical on Okinawa doesn’t have a pediatric GI doc… Conveniently, by then I have also pissed off just about everyone on the island of Okinawa because I have become a true convert to being a defense attorney and I’m wreaking havoc in court on commands. It’s not that I was great at it; it’s that I fought like hell for every single client and case because I understood that to be the obligation. I came to realize that what the Marine Corps really wanted was merely “adequate” defense before the conviction; enough for a defense attorney to meet the Supreme Court’s Strickland standard for effective assistance to uphold the conviction on appeal. I actually wanted to win.
At one point, in the middle of a court-martial, the night before jury selection, I get an intermediate appellate stay in my anthrax vaccine refuser cases, halting the shots on the island. I have also defended a Marine charged with raping an Okinawa national in base housing and a Marine light-heavyweight boxer who punched an Okinawa woman in the face out in town… worst of all, I have done it with excessive zeal.1
All of which conspires to put us back stateside in Quantico, Virginia, in 2000, where every Marine Officer’s career begins, but now I’m not an officer can-o’-dirt, or a new shavetail 2nd Lieutenant, I’m a senior captain and the Base’s lead prosecutor. I work for the Military Justice Officer, who oversees all miljus matters for the base, but I’m the guy who takes cases to court.
Meanwhile…
They Start Dropping Like Harriers
Of course I’ve been keeping my eyes on the sky. Part of my remit on Okinawa is that I handle cases from 3d Marine Aircraft Wing and my office on Camp Foster is close enough for me to catch glimpses of aircraft in the pattern above the surrounding hills. Once in a blue moon, I run into an old colleague from my flying days.
On April 8, 2000, four MV-22 Ospreys were conducting a nighttime training exercise that we call “NEO” - no, not because of Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix” - it’s an acronym for “Non-combatant Evacuation Operation”. It’s to simulate an embassy evacuation or some type of similar event. Two Ospreys were actually to fly the mission with 2 additional Osprey following at a short distance to observe the mission.
As they approached the landing site, the pilots of the mishap V-22 realized they were 2,000 feet above the required altitude and reduced power. As Lt. Colonel Brow maneuvered the aircraft to land, the Osprey entered an erratic roll, turning on its back and slamming into the ground nose first. All 19 Marines aboard the aircraft were killed. The second V-22 also made a hard landing but suffered no fatalities.
In sum, they broke one of the cardinal rules of helicopter flying: they descended faster than 800 ft/mn at less than 40 knots, entering something (else) unique (ly dangerous) to helicopter flight, known as vortex ring state. In essence, if you descend too shallow and too quickly, you settle into your own “dirty” air that the rotors have already “chopped up” and instantly lose lift, dropping like a greased safe. In a regular helicopter, the only chance to recover or “get out” of it is to stuff the nose and get forward of the shitty, “lift-less” air. In a V-22, however, because the rotors are side-by-side when it turns to “helo-mode” and therefore have (mostly) two different columns of air, well… the Osprey snap-rolled and went in upside-down on its nose.
I called Jeff at some point to talk. Of course he knew people involved. It turns out that I knew at least one of the pilots in one of the other 3 Ospreys there that night, as well. At the time, Jeff was serving as the OIC2 of the squadron’s Flight Line shop. In a Marine aviation helo squadron, the Flight Line shop is the largest because it contains most of the “wrenchturners” - maintainers, mechs, they have a bunch of nicknames - but those are the Marines who work on, and fix, those aircraft.
Six months later in October 2000 I was back stateside in Quantico. The JAGMAN investigation had came out on July 27, 2000, and it did not look good for the Osprey. And then it got worse.
[The DoD] Director of Operational Test and Evaluation wrote a report seven months after the crash stating the Osprey was not “operationally suitable, primarily because of reliability, maintainability, availability, human factors and interoperability issues”, and implored more research to be conducted into the Osprey’s susceptibility to vortex ring state.[13] Nevertheless, a panel, convened by Secretary of Defense William Cohen to review the V-22 program, recommended its continuance despite many issues with safety and reliability. As a result, the procurement budget was decreased, but the research and development budget was increased. Eight months later, another MV-22 Osprey, conducting training near Jacksonville, North Carolina, crashed, killing 4 Marines.
Jeff was the Casualty Assistance Officer (CACO) for the crash that killed the 4 Marines. i.e. The person who does the death notification to the family. Those were his squadronmates, and two of his Marines, in the back of that aircraft. I had left aviation and gone on with my relatively safe and comfortable life behind a desk and now the mishaps were happening to others.
It’s Never the Crime; it’s the Cover-Up
Jeff called me before the 60 Minutes piece about the CO of VMMT-204, LtCol Fred Leberman aired in January of 2001. A crew chief had recorded an all hands meeting in which the CO told folks to fudge maintenance records - i.e. lie on official documents - to make it look like the Ospreys had better “Up” time. i.e. That the V-22 was not the absolute maintenance hangar queen that every pilot and air traffic controller aboard New River Air Station knew they were. It is an exceedingly small place and everyone there knows what the local pattern and taxiing looks like for “normal”, healthy operations, as a whole, and for each squadron. It’s evident on the radios, as well.
It can’t be hidden in reality, but it sure can be made to look a lot better on paper! Ahhhh, welcome to government acquisitions. CBS News followed up with a series of stories, including this Jan. 31, 2001, article that implicated several generals.
CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent Mike Wallace reports there has apparently been a systematic effort by the Marine Corps to mislead the American public about the integrity of maintenance and safety data on the MV-22 Osprey — the aircraft in which 23 marines have died in crashes in the past ten months.
The commanding officer of the Osprey Unit, Lt. Col. Fred Leberman, was relieved of his command earlier this month for his acknowledged role in the falsification of records.
At the time of last week's report, it was unclear if Marine Corps officers above Col. Leberman knew what was going on. CBS News has now learned that two of the Marine's highest ranking officers apparently knew full well that data they were reporting about the Osprey were not accurate.
60 Minutes has obtained an email sent from Brigadier General James Amos to Lt. General Fred McCorkle, Deputy Commandant of Marine aviation.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, LtCol Leberman’s assigned military defense counsel reaches out to me. Did I mention I was working as the chief prosecutor for MCB Quantico at the time?
But it’s a small Marine Corps and the guy who calls knows I was a Cobra pilot and he knows I was stationed at New River, so…
Why would the Marine Corps leadership distort the Osprey's performance numbers? Perhaps because the Marines need to show that at least 75 percent of the entire Osprey squadron is “mission capable” before the Pentagon will approve full production of 360 of the aircraft at a cost of nearly $30 billion.
Gen. Amos said that any attack on the integrity of the Marine Corps “stings me like a hot poker to my heart.”
McCorkle’s callsign was “Assassin” - at least, that’s what he was going by when he was the 2d MAW CG and I was pilot in that Air Wing. When I was still a member and on my way into the base theater to hear him speak I asked about the moniker’s origin and an older pilot in the squadron told me it had nothing to do with battlefield feats, but referred to the careers of other officers he had destroyed. I have no idea if it is true or not.
BGen Amos would do just fine for himself and go on to become Commandant of the Marine Corps, notwithstanding his obvious involvement in perpetrating a fraud in order to continue to hold the Osprey program afloat, despite the fact that it couldn’t meet standards to get to “MILESTONE III”, the contractual gateway in order to allow further testing to happen. The Osprey should have been killed time and time again, yet somehow, it lived on through the blood sacrifices of young Marine pilots, aircrew, and troops in the back.
23 years later those guys have done well enough for themselves and how is the wonder aircraft doing? (From the June 2024 article)
After more than a dozen MV-22 Osprey incidents involving what is known as a hard clutch engagement, or HCE -- including one that claimed the lives of five Marines -- military officials now say that they have finally made progress in understanding the deadly issue.
“While the ultimate root cause has not yet been verified, the HCE team has narrowed down the scope of the investigation to a leading theory,” Neil Lobeda, a spokesman for the Osprey’s Joint Program Office, told Military.com in an email.
That theory, according to Lobeda, is something called “out of phase engagement.”
See? Nothing to worry about here. They’ve got a theory.
Futurists never correctly predict how technology will be used. If the Osprey ever becomes operationally useful it will be because it was repurposed to some as-yet-unseen need, and not the originally designed use-case. It could just wind up like many “neat” technologies that seemed so promising yet never live up to their potential, like Intellivision,3 Betamax,4 and many more. The difference is that this one is going to suck up maybe a trillion dollars and kill a bunch of Marines - it already has - along the way. And Boeing will continue to be one of the largest companies in the world while its aircraft kill military and civilians alike without consequence for anyone - because it’s the crony provider for the US government. And whistleblowers against it seem to die right when testimony begins.
There is an old joke in the Marine Corps defense bar that the quickest way to a short tour in defense is to win some acquittals.
Officer in Charge.
It was waaayyy better than Atari. I know, I was there, and the target audience.
Ditto.
Another well written story real life stuff. So sad our government doesn’t give 2 shits about our military personnel. Awful.