AURORA, Colo. — The Air Force still isn’t sure when it’d resume flying the CV-22 Osprey, greater than two months after an Osprey crash that killed eight special operations airmen off the coast of Japan spurred the U.S. military to ground a whole bunch of the tiltrotor aircraft.
Air Force investigators are continuing to probe the Nov. 29 crash in parallel with a comprehensive review of whether the service’s Osprey force is correctly trained and equipped to fly safely, Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind told reporters on the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here Tuesday.
While Bauernfeind offered no additional clues into what can have caused the accident, the Pentagon’s Joint Safety Council said earlier this month it was working with the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy to return their Ospreys to service.
Bauernfeind said he’s in weekly conversations with leaders from the sister services to find out the trail forward to flight, adding that flights will only resume after he has full confidence in training, crews and the platform, in addition to measures in place to mitigate future issues.
“What’s the data we’d like to now put the suitable risk mitigations in place to maneuver forward?” he said. “Simply because we’re having those conversations doesn’t mean that we’ve got the data we’d like yet.”
The U.S. military grounded its fleet of around 400 Ospreys — about 50 of which belong to the Air Force — on Dec. 6 because the mishap investigation got underway. Japan also stopped flying its own 14 Ospreys after the accident.
The tiltrotor aircraft is thought for its towering nacelles that allow it to launch and land like a helicopter, and speed forward like a fixed-wing plane. Air Force special operations units use the CV-22 to navigate into and out of areas where fixed-wing planes may not give you the chance to land with troops and supplies. Each Osprey can carry about three dozen troops or 10,000 kilos of cargo.
While it stays unclear what downed the American CV-22 in November, the Air Force has said that an aircraft malfunction — not a mistake by the crew — likely caused the crash. The Associated Press reported earlier this month that the Pentagon believes it has identified the cause but has declined to reveal the data as further evaluation is underway.
4 fatal Osprey crashes, including the most recent mishap, have claimed the lives of 20 American troops since March 2022. It also marked the primary fatal incident involving an Air Force-owned CV-22 since 2010, and the service’s deadliest accident since 2018, when nine Puerto Rico Air National Guard troops died in a WC-130 weather reconnaissance plane crash.
The Air Force grounded its Osprey fleet for 2 weeks in 2022 following back-to-back “hard clutch” incidents, after the aircraft’s clutch temporarily slipped after which re-engaged. The move unevenly distributes power to the aircraft’s massive rotors and may cause it to lurch. Certainly one of those hard clutch problems caused a June 2022 crash that killed five Marines.
Bauernfeind said commanders across the globe have “leveraged other joint force capabilities” to satisfy their each day operational needs, but didn’t say how.
“There’s a powerful desire to return to fly since it is a capability we wish to have,” he said. “But we wish to give you the chance to return to fly with as much knowledge as we possibly can, in order that we will make sure that we’re safely caring for our crews.”
Navy Rear Adm. Chris Engdahl, chairman of the Joint Safety Council and head of Naval Safety Command, told the Associated Press that commanders across the services may have to assemble input on how long troops would want to spend in simulators to get able to fly again, and what maintenance each Osprey needs before resuming operations.
“The Air Force and Marine Corps have been running the Osprey’s engines; the Marines have been conducting ground movements to maintain the aircraft working,” the AP reported.
The Air Force announced Jan. 11 it had called off the weekslong, multinational search effort that recovered all but one among the Osprey’s downed crew members.
The service held a memorial for the fallen airmen earlier this month at Kadena Air Base, Japan, where two of the Osprey’s crew members were assigned. A bigger memorial is planned for Thursday at Japan’s Yokota Air Base, where the downed crew was assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing.
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 Latest York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.