http://www.shephard.co.uk/Rotorhub/D...9-419f8b838974
The following will appear in the 'Eye on Americas' column in the November-December edition of Defence Helicopter magazine.
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Can a V-22 autorotate? No, but the reasons it won’t have to are more important.
Do USMC MV-22Bs have a forward-firing gun? No, but the reasons they don’t need one are more important.
Have Osprey prototypes crashed? Yes, but the specifics of each incident are the real point.
Selectivity - of the extreme type practiced by Time magazine in a recent cover story (‘A Flying Shame,’ September 27, 2007) - hold readers hostage to an incomplete, at best, parsing of the facts.
Speaking as a correspondent who has followed the Osprey debate pretty thoroughly over the years, this is a disservice to a genuine advance in national aeronautics capability of which the nation should be proud, not dismissive. In fact the Marines - currently and no doubt tentatively probing it’s use in Iraq - deserve our admiration for their foresight. We will go out on a limb: the Osprey is safe, well tested (within the limits of human capability), and well poised to pay back the investment of national will and treasury it took to get here.
Over the years this is a circus that has been fascinating to watch. A sort of tendentious negativism has come to roost among the Osprey's critics, which won’t be moved whatever the evidence.
In parallel, meanwhile, the technology inside it has vaulted ahead; early Ospreys, designed when digital meant watches bear, practically speaking, no resemblance to the current models.
Materials, digital controls, production predictability, maintenance and support - in fact, almost anything aerospace science and technology has given us - has in turn accelerated beyond recognition over the past ten years; it’s undeniable that much of it has made its way into the aircraft.
We were at a small Virginia airport this summer when a USAF crew returned in a CV-22. They had just flown out of the Blue Ridge mountains, 40-50 feet off the ground doing 200 knots, in actual fog, to prove a wondrous thing called TFR (terrain following radar) works as advertised.
We were in the back of an Osprey over Britain’s Salisbury Plain when its USMC pilot suddenly got taken by an urge to rack his aircraft around. No agile helicopter (and we’ve flown Apaches, Cobras, Lynxes and MH-6s) can perform like an MV-22 near the ground. Ospreys feel - well, they feel, in a word, tough. Helicopters creak and flex in the air, particularly so when flying radically. The V-22 is testament to its precision composite construction.
Some time ago - at the height of the vortex ring state paranoia - we fashioned a satirical Time magazine/Washington Post type headline: 'Sources revealed today that a 747 will fall out of the air if the pilot allows it to get below about 100 knots. Engineers call it ‘stalling’ and although they’ve known about it for years, nothing has been done...' Absurd on its face, but it has to be said (and we’re sorry to say it) the pilots in the Marana accident (four of them, the two in the lead aircraft got down with busted parts and bruised egos) flew their aircraft outside the envelope that was designed (and so noted in the flight manual) to ensure it didn’t ‘stall.’
We have - over the years - been impressed by the brainpower, persistence and commitment that’s gone into this project.
I know, I know, ‘big’ media will accuse me (they already do) of drinking the Koole Aid, but it’s a fact: this aircraft epitomises the best the aerospace culture today can come up with, which is saying a lot.
It’s not designed to ignore the realities of landing at hostile LZs, or built to ignore the fact it can’t auotorotate for convenient reasons.
It’s built, instead, to take account of new realities that have grown up while most of its negative correspondents have assiduously been fighting the last (Vietnam) war and ignoring what’s been happening since.
Battlefields today are digitally networked, prepped by precision missiles and bombs that don’t miss, hosts to true combined arms and joint integrated force action that has appeared only relatively recently.
(Surveillance, for example, is today a huge differentiatior, with UAVs doing real-time reconaissance, feeding the stuff back directly to the cockpit). No, the days of little Hueys, crewed by some of the bravest aviators in history, spiralling down into gun and rocket fire are probably over. (We say probably because asymmetric warfare is a problem; the appearance of IEDs in Iraq is an asymmetric problem).
But we also would say we respect the Osprey critics we’ve met, the real critics, the ones - industry and military - who have had to do the figuring, fix the processes, design the work-arounds, fly the tests flight, and who are part of the iterative process.
To deny the genuiness of their effort, conscientiousness and professionalism is not only wrong, but it is to fall into today’s one-sided cultural thinking - that everything that lacks an instantly emotional identity is somehow not valid. Anything said in defence of something like the Osprey is dismissable for falling outside the cultural norms of the day.
Time magazine didn’t do this directly, obviously, but Chuck Allen, the Boeing rotorcraft GM where they build half the V-22, told me he got letters from workers asking why their efforts were being thrown to the journalistic winds like this. Another source talked of mothers concerned their (Marine) kids would fly the Osprey in Iraq.
We saw Fox NewsTV - discussing the article - show the tape over and over again from Grady Wilson’s Wilmington accident years ago (1991, an early prototype, with both pilots getting out unhurt). It was troublesome that some gunner in some far off place somewhere might just have relished it greatly - the angles, the way the controls moved, the profile it presented against the skyline - for the info it gave him. It seems we’re too casual about the criticism we sometimes bring to these things. Words have consequences.
- David S. Harvey.