Osprey an ‘Asset’ but Far From Ready, Review Finds

The Marine Corps’ V-22 Osprey aircraft is a unique and valuable technology but has been so poorly engineered and tested that it is not ready to be fielded, a Pentagon review panel told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, the panel’s four members called the Osprey a “national asset” and contended that it can be fixed, although doing so would require dozens of changes. They estimated that the changes would delay the fielding of the tilt-rotor aircraft by one to two years.

Both the committee’s chairman and its ranking Democrat expressed skepticism about the Osprey, a hybrid aircraft that takes off like a helicopter but can fly like a conventional airplane.

The Marine Corps says that the aircraft is essential to its ability to operate in the 21st century.

But the deaths of 23 Marines in two Osprey crashes over the last year led to the Pentagon’s special review of the program. The conclusions of that review were unveiled Tuesday.

Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and ranking minority member Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said they want more information before deciding whether to accept the Pentagon panel’s recommendation that the troubled program be “continued but restructured.”

Warner said he did not yet know whether the increased range and speed of the Osprey would be worth its cost and risk. He also said he was not persuaded that the Pentagon panel’s recommendations would be sufficient to right the $40-billion program.

The Pentagon panel was chaired by retired Marine Gen. John Dailey, now director of the National Air and Space Museum. Its other members were retired Air Force Gen. James Davis and Eugene Covert, director of the Center for Aerodynamic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A separate Defense Department investigation of alleged falsification of maintenance records by members of the Corps’ Osprey squadron is still underway. The former commander of that squadron, Lt. Col. Odin “Fred” Leberman, was fired in January after he was taped telling his subordinates to “lie” about maintenance problems to make the plane look readier than it really was.