Senior Air Force generals rejected the finding of an Air Force crash team which investigated the crash-landing of a V-22 osprey in Afghanistan.
Probably because it makes their shiny new toy look bad, so the generals preferred to shuffle the blame onto the dead pilot.
(H/T)
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Friday, December 17, 2010
6 comments:
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Huh. I didn't even know Uncle Sam's Christian Flying Club even *had* any Ospreys, I thought they were all USMC. But looking at Boeing's site, it appears the Air Farce does indeed plan to buy 50 of the ungainly birds for special ops missions. Which makes you wonder what mission this bird was on when it got shot down (which is almost 100% certain what happened to the thing, the sad thing about this widowmaker is that you just have to kill *one engine* to make it unlandable), it certainly wasn't on a coffee run, that much is for sure!
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, the Air Farce has a long history of blaming the pilot then hiding behind bogus "states secrets" claims, all the way back to the 1949 Waycross B-29 crash that established the state secrets doctrine that the Bushevik and O'Bushevik regimes are so fond of invoking.
- Badtux the Flightless Penguin
Set sarcasm/on
ReplyDeleteOF course it's the pilots fault. You have to be absolutely insane to fly something with that crash history. That
is default incompetence and this is what the V22 drivers can expect.
Set sarcasm/off[option:mostly]
My cut is that bird will no doubt be more susceptible to a golden BB due to its complexity.
Eck!
As an engineering exercise, the Osprey has some interest. However, as an aircraft being deployed in combat zones, it's a miserable failure and will continue to kill troops as long as it's used.
ReplyDeleteAll the folks responsible for its purchase and deployment should be made to use it for all their transportation needs.
And it's a financial black hole as well.
Yea, what is the Air Force doing w/ Osprey's ?
ReplyDeleteAnd can anybody tell me why the Marines fought, lied and spent SO much on a marginal aircraft?
Tom: The Air Farce has a small fleet of MH-53 helicopters for Special Ops and pilot rescue missions. It appears the Osprey is going to supplement that force for missions where the MH-53 can't go either due to altitude or distance from base. The Osprey's range is *far* longer than that of a helicopter, and it can fly higher too, both of which make it possible to conduct some missions that helicopters simply can't do.
ReplyDeleteAs for why the USMC wanted the Osprey, it reduces the USMC's reliance upon the Air Farce for transporting their rotary-wing fleet into theatre, since the Osprey is theoretically capable of self-deploying as a conventional aircraft (that is, it is theoretically capable, in ferry mode, of leaving bases in the U.S. and eventually arriving anywhere in the world after a couple of refueling stops on the way). I say "theoretically capable" because the things fall out of the air so readily that even the USMC brass gulp at the notion of actually trying it, and end up having the Ospreys brought in by cargo jet after all. So the Osprey, for the USMC, is just another chess piece in the normal inter-service rivalry thing -- one that happens to kill jarheads, but that's acceptable (within limits) to the USMC brass.
Eck!, yes, the Osprey is *extremely* susceptible to golden BB's, it can neither auto-rotate like a helicopter nor easily glide in for a landing like an airplane. While I can appreciate the motivation for a VSTOL troop transport with the Osprey's basic capabilities, a tilt-rotor system is a piss-poor way of doing it because transition from forward flight to hovering flight is (literally) a killer, only a computer can do it because the aircraft is fundamentally unstable during that transmission, and the slightest interference -- a sensor shot off, whatever -- makes transition basically impossible because the computer no longer has the ability to correct for the fundamental instability. There has to be better ways to get an aircraft capable of doing what the Osprey can do -- maybe a ducted turbine system like the Harrier, maybe a hybrid system of some sort, but the Osprey is a golden albatross if there ever was one and it's fundamental to the architecture -- i.e., unfixable.
The V-22 can't deploy by ship because the damn exhaust is hot enough to damage the decks of the CVNs and LHAs. Nobody on the CV or amphib design desk was told how hot the exhaust was from a V-22, nor did they think to ask.
ReplyDeleteThat's because the Navy has gotten really sucky at systems engineering over the last few decades. But that's nothing new. They had to beef up the LHA's well deck when it became apparent that it was easy to park a M-60 in places where there was nothing supporting the tank other than the deck plates (no structural beams).