Word: ospreys
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When the Marines stripped Lieut. Colonel Odin Leberman of his command of the corps' lone V-22 Osprey squadron, Leberman admitted that he had told his mechanics to falsify maintenance records to make the troubled aircraft look better. The Osprey, despite 18 years of work and a $12 billion taxpayer investment, needed all the help it could get. Two crashes in the space of eight months had killed 23 Marines, aggravating concerns of the Pentagon about the aircraft's reliability as it weighed going into full-scale production. But now, as the Pentagon begins full-blown probes into both...
Some challenges are to be expected when building a revolutionary aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but cruises like an airplane--at twice a chopper's speed. As pilots like to say, military flight manuals are written in blood. The growing question around the Osprey is whether its rotor design has a tendency to push the aircraft into a roll that quickly turns into a fatal plunge. Such dives "can occur at any time and consequences are exceedingly grave," according to an unreleased General Accounting Office report circulating on Capitol Hill. "The V-22 appears...
...Osprey's real bugaboo is the amount of maintenance it requires, which is why Leberman ordered his troops to falsify records. "Maintainers are being told they have to lie on maintenance records to make the numbers look good," a V-22 mechanic said in an anonymous letter to the Pentagon. What is amazing is how bad the numbers are - even after the deception. A recent independent review, apparently incorporating the misleading data, said the V-22s were fully prepared for their missions just 20 percent of the time, well short of the corps' 75 percent requirement. An Osprey crash last...
...Despite these concerns, Marine officers say, the Pentagon was well on its way to approving full-scale production. Then a December Osprey crash killed four Marines and, a month later, disclosures about the fudged records put that decision on hold. For now, the Pentagon's 12 Ospreys remain grounded...
...more than a decade ago that Dick Cheney, who was then running the Pentagon, tried to kill the program because of its high price tag. But the corps and its allies on Capitol Hill waged war against him and won. Now a new battle over the Osprey looms. If Vice President Cheney decides to wage war again, this time he will come far better armed...