The U.S. military doesn’t expect its fleet of greater than 400 V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft to totally resume normal flight operations until a minimum of the center of 2025, a Navy admiral answerable for the joint program told a House Oversight subcommittee Wednesday.
Naval Air Systems Command boss Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, whose office oversees Ospreys in use across the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, said a review that’s probing whether the enterprise has adequate manning, training and equipment, will last one other six to nine months.
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“As now we have findings from the excellent review, I’ll take the essential actions to make sure continued protected flight operations,” Chebi told the panel of lawmakers.
The command allowed the Osprey to start returning to the air — with flight restrictions in place — in early March, three months after the fleet was grounded in early December following an Air Force CV-22 crash off the coast of Japan that killed all eight airmen on board.
Ospreys could be flown like an airplane and take off and land like a helicopter, making them useful for aircraft carrier landings in addition to for special operators entering austere environments.
The Marine Corps operates a whole lot of the aircraft, while the Air Force and Navy own around 50 and 30, respectively. Marine Ospreys are beginning to reenter the fray; 10 aircraft from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 268 headed to Hawaii in May in preparation for a training exercise in Australia, while the twenty fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit is using them in Sweden as a part of Exercise Baltic Operations.
The Navy’s CMV-22 fleet stays sidelined from performing its carrier support mission at sea, service officials said Wednesday. Despite getting the green light to resume regular missions, the services are barred from flying greater than half-hour from an airfield where they might land in case of an emergency, in response to Military.com.
Osprey crews at Cannon Air Force Base, Recent Mexico, have begun rebuilding their skills in anticipation of returning to normal ops, and other squadrons are getting near flying again, Air Force Special Operations Command spokesperson Lt. Col. Rebecca Heyse told Air Force Times.
An investigation into the Air Force’s Nov. 29 CV-22 crash is nearing completion, with briefings for families expected in the approaching weeks. The military has said that accident was the results of a cloth failure that hadn’t been seen before on the Osprey.
Ospreys have suffered a string of fatal crashes because the U.S. military introduced them into special operations greater than twenty years ago, including 4 mishaps which have killed 20 service members since March 2022. The military grounded the Ospreys in 2022 and again in 2023, after a series of “hard clutch engagements” that occurred when the input quill assembly, which attaches the Osprey’s engine to its proprotor gear box, wore out sooner than expected.
On Wednesday, Chebi and Gary Kurtz, program executive officer for anti-submarine, assault and special mission programs including the Osprey, told lawmakers that a redesigned clutch is predicted to start testing soon.
“We anticipate that we’ll have a brand new clutch fielding within the mid-2025 timeframe,” Kurtz said.
Faced by Gold Star families who held photos of family members during Wednesday’s hearing, lawmakers questioned the aircraft’s mishap and readiness rates, the latter of which have struggled lately because of woes like corrosion issues and an absence of obtainable parts.
For instance, the Air Force CV-22 fleet’s mission-capable rate, or the proportion of time that the aircraft can perform a minimum of certainly one of its core missions, hovered around 50% between fiscal years 2020 and 2022, in response to data provided to Air Force Times.
Members of the House Oversight Committee also pushed for more transparency, saying the military wasn’t sharing enough concerning the findings on its recent crashes.
Some on Capitol Hill are running out of patience.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called for all the fleet to be grounded while the military works works out a fix for the clutch.
“If one other Osprey goes down, we’re done,” Lynch said. “This program’s done.”
Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The Recent York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.