Military Officer - January 2007 - (Page 52)

Members of the U.S. Air Force fly an air-refueling mission over New Mexico. (below) A Marine Corps crew chief is one of the first to fire the new, rearmounted weapon system. tico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, resulting in an 11month grounding and several design changes. Flight testing resumed in August 1993, and after several years of successful trials, operational evaluation concluded in mid-2000, when the Department of the Navy announced that the MV-22 had been judged operationally effective and suitable for land-based operations. But then came fatal crashes in Arizona and North Carolina. The Osprey was grounded and stayed that way for the better part of two years while accident investigators sifted through the evidence to determine the causal factors. Meanwhile, critics of the V-22 pointed to the mishaps as proof that the tilt-rotor concept was ﬂawed and called for ﬁnal cancellation of the program. Organizations such as the Project On Government Oversight and G2mil.com leaped into the fray. CBS’ 60 Minutes ran a scathing condemnation of the Osprey program, and Col. Harry P. Dunn, USAF-Ret., a self-appointed critic of the Osprey, condemned the aircraft as “a crippled albatross, which will continue killing” unless the program was canceled. Most new aircraft designs incorporate some novel features, but the V-22 goes far beyond the norm. Designed to take off like a helicopter and ﬂy like an airplane, its tilt-rotor design aims to combine the strengths of each type of aircraft into one package. The technology might seem cutting-edge, but the tilt-rotor concept dates back to the mid-1950s and the ungainly but groundbreaking Transcendental Model 1G. The ﬁrst successful military tiltrotor prototype was the Bell XV-15, which ﬂew at the 1981 Paris Air Show. In attendance was President Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, who thought a tilt-rotor would ﬁll a gap in his service’s asset roster. Within two years, the Joint Advanced Vertical Lift Aircraft program was in full swing, designed to produce a tilt-rotor aircraft that could be used 52 MILITARY OFFICER JANUARY 2007 by all branches of the military. Because the Marine Corps stood to acquire more aircraft than the other services, its baseline needs took precedence, and a Marine ofﬁcer was assigned as program manager. Bell-Boeing was tasked with producing a preliminary design, and the V-22 was on its way from paper to prototype. In 1985 the nascent aircraft was designated the V-22 Osprey, and in March 1989 the ﬁrst prototype ﬁnally took to the skies. The following month, the program met with the ﬁrst of many setbacks when it was canceled by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who pronounced the V-22 and its estimated cost of about $35 million per unit unaffordable. But each time Cheney cut funding for the Osprey, Congress reinstated it. After several years of this, Cheney threw in the towel in 1992 and withdrew his ofﬁcial opposition to the aircraft, despite his remaining personal objections. Regroup, reconstruct Following the mishaps in 2000, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen formed a blue-ribbon panel of aviation experts to determine whether the Osprey program should continue. In the spring of 2001 the panel recommended that the program proceed — however Wounded bird That wasn’t the end of the Osprey’s problems. In 1992 came the ﬁrst fatal crash of a V-22 prototype at Quan- PHOTOS: PREVIOUS PAGE, PHOTGRAPHER’S MATE AIRMAN ZACHARY L. BORDEN, USN; ABOVE, LANCE CPL. SAMUEL D. WHITE, USMC; TOP, TECH SGT. CECILIO M. RICARDO JR., USAF http://www.G2mil.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Military Officer - January 2007

Military Officer - January 2007 Contents From the Editor From the Chairman Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Chapter Activities Cover Story: Osprey Rising? Battlefields of the Great War I Resolve ... New Mission Pages of History Information Exchange Advertising Index MOAA Scholarship Donors MOAA Member Services MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps Member Books Encore

Military Officer - January 2007

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