The Virginian-Pilot December 22, 2001
Pentagon to resume Osprey flight tests
By DALE EISMAN
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon will put the Marine Corps' troubled V-22 ``Osprey'' through a new and more vigorous round of flight tests, a top official disclosed Friday, in a final bid to see if its innovative ``tilt-rotor'' design can be made safe.
``I personally still have some doubts'' about the aircraft, said Edward C. ``Pete'' Aldridge, the Defense Department's top weapons buyer. But the versatility and potential of the twin-engine Osprey, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but rotates its rotors forward to fly like a conventional airplane, are so great that the program should have every chance to succeed, he said.
The Marines' lack of an alternative to replace their aging fleet of transport helicopters apparently also figured in the decision to resume Osprey flight tests in the spring. The planes have been grounded for more than a year after three crashes killed 30 Marines and a scandal involving falsified maintenance records in the test program.
Aldridge said the new test program could last two years, or longer, depending on the Osprey's performance. ``It will be event-driven as opposed to schedule-driven,'' he insisted.
The new round of tests will add up to $1.8 billion annually to the program's cost, Aldridge said. The Pentagon's current plans call for the purchase of 458 Ospreys, at a total cost of more than $37 billion.
The Marines, who will get 360 of the planes, are counting on the Osprey as a replacement for its fleet of CH-46 transport helicopters, many of which are more than 30 years old. The Osprey can fly faster (up to 240 knots, or 276 mph) and further (200 miles with a full load), and carry more troops (24) than any ship-borne aircraft in service. The Osprey is the centerpiece of the Marines' long-term plan to be the first U.S. ground force involved in any future war.
But ``there are lots of questions we don't have answers to'' about the plane's safety and affordability, Aldridge said. Among the problems:
Four crashes since 1991 have raised doubts about the Osprey's performance at slow speeds as it prepares to land.
The plane's rotors stir up such massive clouds of dust that in dry weather pilots have trouble seeing the ground. The downdraft is so severe that on carrier landings, the plane can be unstable if one rotor is over the deck while the second is over the water. The hydraulics system has incurred multiple failures, forcing a redesign.
``They are clearly far away from having this thing be something that you could routinely trust to do the job,'' said John Pike, an independent analyst who runs GlobalSecurity.org, a Web site that tracks weapons programs. Pike said investigations of the Osprey's problems suggest ``none of them are show stoppers'' but the problems pose ``reasons to go slow.''
While proceeding with caution on the Osprey, Aldridge said the Pentagon will restructure another troubled Navy weapons system -- an ``areawide'' missile defense program canceled last week because of cost overruns.
The Navy's need for missile defenses remains, Aldridge said, but officials concluded that the program would not be within cost boundaries set on Capitol Hill.
He suggested that an alternative under consideration probably will rely on a ``hit-to-kill'' warhead similar to those the Pentagon is developing for land-based missile defenses, rather than the ``blast fragment'' warhead the Navy was testing.
The scuttled design called for the defensive warhead to explode in the general area of an incoming missile, relying on shrapnel to destroy or disable the attacker.
© 2001 The Virginian-Pilot
