A string of incidents involving V-22 Ospreys, together with the crash off the coast of Japan final month that killed eight particular operations airmen, is prompting a congressional investigation into the plane’s security and efficiency.
In a letter Thursday, Home Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., requested Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin flip over a slew of paperwork on the Osprey program, together with security data, upkeep logs, accident investigations, efficiency evaluations and extra.
“It’s essential for the protection of our service members to make sure transparency, accountability and an intensive understanding of the steps DoD is taking to mitigate any additional mechanical dangers,” Comer wrote within the letter.
Learn Subsequent: The US Wished Out of the Center East. The Center East Had Different Concepts.
Comer gave Austin a Jan. 4 deadline to offer the paperwork to his committee.
The Oversight Committee’s probe comes after what was the Air Drive‘s deadliest Osprey crash to this point. On Nov. 29, a CV-22B Osprey assigned to the 353rd Particular Operations Wing went down into the ocean throughout a coaching mission off the shore of Yakushima Island, killing all eight crew members aboard.
After a preliminary investigation steered the reason for the crash was a mechanical failure, the Air Drive, Marines and Navy introduced they have been grounding their whole fleets of Ospreys to conduct upkeep and inspections. It is the primary time all three providers that fly the plane have grounded it directly.
The November crash was simply the most recent in a sequence of incidents and mechanical points that has plagued the plane since its first flight in 1989. Greater than 60 service members have died in additional than a dozen Osprey accidents since its first deadly crash in 1992, together with 20 deaths simply since 2022.
Final yr, after the Air Drive introduced a shock security stand-down for the plane, the navy providers revealed they have been conscious of a mechanical difficulty referred to as a tough clutch engagement, or HCE, that had prompted at the least 15 recognized Osprey incidents between 2010 and 2022.
The underlying reason behind the HCEs, which occur when the plane’s clutches jam and shred inner parts related to the rotors, stays unknown.
Nonetheless, the navy providers have stated they continue to be assured within the plane, which gives a novel functionality with its tiltrotor expertise that permits it to take off and land like a helicopter however fly at larger speeds like an airplane.
The plane’s defenders additionally spotlight a Marine Corps statistic that, for each 100,000 hours of flight, the Osprey has fewer mishaps than the F/A-18 Tremendous Hornet, the F-35B Lightning II fighter jet, the CH-53E Tremendous Stallion and different service plane. However that statistic does not account for what’s believed to be the most typical kind of HCE incident, mishaps which might be nonetheless pricey and harrowing however that fall in need of the highest definition for incident reporting by the navy that requires demise, whole destruction of the plane or greater than $2.5 million in damages.
In his letter, Comer acknowledged the “important benefits the Osprey can carry to fight” and that “statistically, the Osprey just isn’t thought of as harmful as another navy plane.”
However he additionally pointed to previous watchdog experiences on continued mechanical points, the $120 million price ticket to purchase every Osprey, and the truth that most fatalities involving the plane have occurred throughout coaching slightly than fight, one thing he stated his panel “stays alarmed” by.
“Given the gravity of the lack of service members’ lives, growing prices, and the long run financial affect and modern purposes of Osprey program expertise,” he wrote, “the committee requests paperwork and knowledge to make clear elements of this system’s security and efficiency.”
Associated: Throughout Osprey Stand-Down, Some Ahead Units Are Limiting Their Use in Operations
