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...spends only a nickel out of every Pentagon dollar and makes do with cheaper weapons than the other services. The story of the V-22 belies that image: It's a tale of how a military service with little experience overseeing aircraft programs has wound up with a plane that may be as notable for its shortcomings as for its technological advances...
Originally, the program was designed to churn out the first of more than 1,000 tilt-rotors in less than 10 years for $40 million each. But this was no conventional plane. The Osprey may cruise like an airplane, but it takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter. The technical challenge of rotating an airplane's wings and engines in midair led to delays, which in turn led to an ever higher price tag. As expenses rose, the Pentagon cut the number of planes it wanted to buy, which in turn increased the unit price. Citing rising costs...
Indeed it does, but that doesn't make the aircraft any safer. The plane's backers said that the chance of a dual-engine failure was so rare that it shouldn't be of concern. Yet the flight manual lists a variety of things that can cause both engines to fail, including "contaminated fuel ... software malfunctions or battle damage." The lone attempted V-22 autorotation "failed miserably," according to an internal 2003 report, obtained by TIME, written by the Institute for Defense Analyses, an in-house Pentagon think tank. "The test data indicate that the aircraft would have impacted...
...That prospect doesn't concern some V-22 pilots, who believe they'll have the altitude and time to convert the aircraft into its airplane mode and hunt for a landing strip if they lose power. "We can turn it into a plane and glide it down, just like a C-130," Captain Justin (Moon) McKinney, a V-22 pilot, said from his North Carolina base as he got ready to head to Iraq. "I have absolutely no safety concerns with this aircraft, flying it here or in Iraq...
Faced with killing the program - or possibly killing those aboard the V-22 - the Marines have opted to save the plane and have largely shifted responsibility for surviving such a catastrophe from the designers to the pilots. While the engineers spent years vainly trying to solve the problem, pilots aboard a stricken V-22 will have just seconds to react. But tellingly, pilots have never practiced the maneuver outside the simulator - the flight manual forbids it - and even in simulators the results have been less than reassuring. "In simulations," the flight manual warns, "the outcome of the landings varied widely...