Um lifting, then I am indeed in deep regret. I should have worked on getting that commercial helicopter ticket before I left the Navy, and tried to get on with a commercial vertrep crew. It may have put stress back on the marriage, but I think it's a job I'd have enjoyed quite a bit more than I do now. I really liked flying at sea ...
Glad to see the Kmax (non IFR certified) idea was scotched.
I was against contracting out the VERTREP mission. I guess it's working out well enough. Onward we march, into the future.
In re the Forbes article, again:
The Osprey has suffered both kinds of setbacks during its history, but not lately so the views many “experts” have of the program are outdated. With production progressing smoothly and few operational problems being encountered, there isn’t much about the V-22 program today that an enterprising reporter can sink his or her teeth into.
Why report good news? Any reporter can still write a story based on cost, since (as is admitted later in the article) the bird is very expensive.
Except maybe this: if the Osprey is performing so much better than legacy aircraft, then why are military services other than the Marine Corps continuing to sink money into traditional solutions to military needs that cannot meet requirements as effectively?
I reject this conclusion. The Army has a fleet of something like 2000 Blackhawks. IF we go back to my analysis above, in terms of how many people you can move per aircraft, divide 2000 aircraft by 2.2 and you get about 910 Osprey equivalents. That's six times as many as the Marines Have, at about five times the price per (100 million or so versus 20 million or so for a Blackhawk) to get 2.2 times the volume of lift ... and while all performance metrics don't scale evenly up and down, the magnitude of the replacement cost with the newer capability, versus the more modestly priced and very reliable Blackhawk, puts you into the following dollar range ... (and don't forget the cited $11,000 dollars per flight hour figure from the GAO).
910 x 100,000,000 = $91,000,000,000
At some point, you run out of money. (I have no inside information, but I suspect that the decision to axe the new amphib vehicle was in part a strategic move to keep funding lines open for Osprey ... not sure).
The Army has a lot of other stuff to buy and maintain, and have chosen not to put speed at as high a priority in their requirements as the Marines have.
The answer, unfortunately, is that the military doesn’t have a rigorous methodology for capturing and comparing all the costs associated with different approaches to performing missions.
Does anyone?
The whole article seems to have been written by someone wearing rose tinted glasses.