Wounded Bird

Monday’s fatal crash of a Marine Corps V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, the second this year, came little more than a week before the corps and the Air Force were to decide whether to go ahead with full-scale production of the revolutionary hybrid. At stake is an eventual $40-billion production run of 458 aircraft, with 360 going to the Marines and the rest to the Air Force and special operations units. That decision has now been put on hold, and there it should remain pending the findings of the investigative panel that Defense Secretary William S. Cohen plans to appoint.

Monday’s crash in North Carolina killed four Marines, and a V-22 crash in Arizona last April killed 19. The corps has grounded its remaining eight experimental Ospreys but nonetheless remains committed to the aircraft, which is designed to carry 24 combat troops or 20,000 pounds of cargo at twice the speed of the CH-46 helicopter it is designed to replace. But others have less confidence. In a report last month Philip E. Coyle III, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, described the V-22’s reliability record as worse than the helicopter it would replace. Some in Congress also call the Osprey too expensive--the current cost for each is put at $44 million--and declare it technically flawed.

Development of the Osprey began in 1983 as a joint project of Boeing and Bell Helicopter. The craft takes off and lands like a helicopter, but once airborne, with its wingtip engines rotated, it converts to a high-speed, high-altitude plane. As president, George Bush tried three times to kill the program but each time was overridden by Congress. The first effort came in 1989 when Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney, refused to spend the development money that Congress voted for the Osprey. As a presidential candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton praised the Osprey, seeing it as an ideal post-Cold War vehicle for ferrying peacekeeping troops to trouble spots or evacuating civilians in natural disasters.

Besides powerful advocacy from the Marines, the V-22 has strong congressional supporters, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), a member of the Defense Appropriations Committee. More than 2,000 jobs in the Ft. Worth and Arlington areas are tied to the V-22 program. But the key issue isn’t jobs. It’s whether the Osprey is safe, reliable and worth its high costs. The Osprey’s trouble-plagued history and the doubts raised by critics, not least in the Pentagon, require a full and independent evaluation of those issues before a decision is made on whether to go on with the program.