As complex a design as a helo is, the Osprey must of course be even more complex -- the engines rotate.
Of course there are going to be crashes. Three during development, in this case. But --
http://breakingdefense.com/2011/08/the-v...th-buying/
Read this as well: http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2011...g-critics/
Of course there are going to be crashes. Three during development, in this case. But --
Quote:By the time the Marines first put the Osprey into service in Iraq in 2007, though, it had cost more time, money and lives than any other piece of equipment the Corps has ever bought — 25 years, $22 billion and 30 deaths in crashes during its development. The Osprey was a very ugly duckling.
Since then, the saga has taken a very different turn, but many of the Osprey’s loudest critics – notable among them the New York Times editorial page – went to sleep in the middle of the story. In February, the Times declared that “the unsafe V-22 Osprey aircraft should…be scaled down now.” In April, the Times again called for cutting the “accident-prone V-22 Osprey.”
Labeling the Osprey “unsafe” and “accident-prone” could be justified a decade ago, when two of the three fatal crashes that occurred during its development had just occurred. Yes, that number is correct; there were only three fatal crashes before the Osprey went into service. Thirty people died in them because the Osprey is a troop carrier, and 19 Marines – 15 of them passengers – were killed in one star-crossed test flight alone. After the last of those terrible crashes, though, the Pentagon grounded the Osprey for 17 months – and fixed what was wrong with it.
As I described in The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey, between 2001 and 2005, the Osprey was redesigned and retested. Sloppily laid out hydraulic lines were rerouted, putting a stop to frequent and dangerous leaks. Flaws in flight control software, which in combination with a hydraulic leak had caused one fatal crash, were fixed. A trio of brave test pilots deliberately and repeatedly flew the Osprey into the little-understood aerodynamic condition that caused its worst crash and figured out how a pilot could get out of it. Cockpit warning devices were installed to keep future pilots from putting an Osprey into this “vortex ring state” in the first place.
http://breakingdefense.com/2011/08/the-v...th-buying/
Read this as well: http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2011...g-critics/
