... a bit late, innit?
I mean, I only really listened to the WTYP episode, but it is described as a machine to kill marines in there...
The US Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have grounded their fleet of Boeing-Bell-made Osprey V-22s on safety grounds. A spokesperson for the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) told The Register that the decision had been made following an incident where one of the aircraft made an emergency landing. "Out of an abundance of …
Have to agree with Elon here.
The US military loves machines that look good on the movie screen but are expensive and better options are available.
THe osprey always was a dumb idea, close combat involving soldiers is not a good way to spend funds, we saw that in Afghanistan and basically all the recent wars. Ukraine has shown there is more value in missile systems of all sizes. For the cost of an osprey one could buy over a thousand manpad systems. It the same for the F22/F35, why spend hundreds of millions on a single plane, when you could replace that with hundreds of cruise missiles.
Ukraine has shown there is more value in missile systems of all sizes.
Ukraine has also shown that the future is intelligent drones. You don't need CAS if you don't have troops on the ground. Today, troops are for holding territory, and that isn't the type of wars that America fights.
"Today, troops are for holding territory, and that isn't the type of wars that America fights."
There's still a need to get eyeballs into places for BDA and intelligence. Many of the issues don't have a "stand on it and deny the enemy" aspect to them, but there could be a situation where that's needed. CAS is also useful for more than supporting troops on the ground. It can also be used to give people fleeing some room from the enemy to get away or buy some time for something else in a difficult area.
The scarey thing is modern wars are basically unwinnable.
Houthis, Taliban, big powers simply cant win in these places for many reasons. Perhaps the most important lesson is reality is very different from the perception. China knows this and thats why they will never dare to invade TW, because they would rather have everyone respect them today than learn what they can actually do.
America is no different, looks good but they too are scared. THey cant do anything to the Houthis, the H are still in power and still doing what they were doing before. Sure they got bombed but they dont care.
Russia is also very different from the perception vs the reality.
"It the same for the F22/F35"
Rather that cruise missiles, a giant order for F-16's could be better. Numbers has an advantage all it's own. I'd be more concerned about 50 A-10's coming over a hill at me than 4 F-22's. There's also the problem that a F-35 costs in the realm of $40,000 to fly. With that sort of expenditure, it's hard to let pilots have lots of flight time to really get to know their aircraft. I see many military's trying to equip themselves to fight the most formidable enemy they can envision rather than the force they are more likely to be deployed against. Again, if it does come to pass that a conflict is with another major combatant, having large numbers of aircraft (ships, etc) and operators with lots of experience might do the trick. A high school friend went into the military to learn how to fly helicopters. After his active hitch was up he was part of the national guard up until his unit had to be deactivated due to lack of aircraft availability. They couldn't get enough stick time to meet minimum requirements. That and the aircraft assigned to them had radios with tubes! they were so old. He was going to quit since he wasn't getting to fly when the stand-down came and that was that. Another factor is that for an advanced aircraft, every loss is a larger hole. If the ration of F-16 to F-35 is 20:1, that's also much more redundancy so if fighting efficiency is cut in half with the F-16, it's still a net increase.
rcxb: Please explain how missile systems are going to rescue hostages... Because that's what the V-22 Osprey was designed for: Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 during the Iran hostage crisis.
cow: Please explain how an osprey is going to rescue any hostages ?
The reality if they did try the hostages would get shot.
Ospreys are not invisible or silent. We all know what a disaster the rescue attempt was, if they did actually land, the hostages would have been shot and the osprey would also have been damaged and the result would be still a failure.
The Ospreys performed ZERO rescue operations remotely similar to the Iran hostage crisis during IQ or AF.
The Ospreys performed ZERO rescue operations remotely similar to the Iran hostage crisis during IQ or AF.
Iraq and Afghanistan were not the places where V-22 Ospreys would need to be used. There, the US had bases all over on the ground. There were no missions out of range of typical helicopters.
if they did try the hostages would get shot.
That is a possibility in any hostage rescue mission.
Noise level isn't always a disqualifying feature, as landing behind a nearby hill or else generating other noisy diversions may be possible. Besides, it's not as though there are any entirely silent options...
You're free to say the US military should never try to rescue hostages, but at least be forthcoming about it, and not pretend it isn't the primary purpose of the V-22. I think many people will disagree with you. Besides discounting rescue ops, you're also promoting additional bystander casualties by saying missiles should (always!) be sent in, instead of soldiers in V-22s on long-range operations where no other craft can operate.
rcxb: Iraq and Afghanistan were not the places where V-22 Ospreys would need to be used. There, the US had bases all over on the ground.
cow: The US did not have bases all over the place, they had a few in a few places, and everywhere else was safe for the Taliban. Thats why we still have the T in power today.
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rcxb: There were no missions out of range of typical helicopters.
cow: Says who ? The Taliban would like to counter your statement.
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rcxb: Noise level isn't always a disqualifying feature, as landing behind a nearby hill or else generating other noisy diversions may be possible. Besides, it's not as though there are any entirely silent options...
cow: Because you say so ?
You can say whagever you like, but the modern example of Usama being shot and not captured alive proves my point, that claims about hostage rescues only happens in the movies.
Stop talking bullshit that has never happened.
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rcxb: Besides discounting rescue ops, you're also promoting additional bystander casualties by saying missiles should (always!) be sent in, instead of soldiers in V-22s on long-range operations where no other craft can operate.
cow: Hang on Usama and all his friends and family in the compound got shot, none were captured. Your claims about special ops taking any building are bullshit.
Game over.
claims about hostage rescues only happens in the movies.Stop talking bullshit that has never happened.
I don't understand people who spout nonsense that is easily disproven with the most cursory web search...
Recently, in June 2024 Israel's IDF rescued four hostages held by Hamas in the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Hostage rescues were a regular occurrence during US involvement in Iraq, and not uncommon in Afghanistan. There are units like DEVGRU/SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force who "specialized in hostage rescue".
In October 2015 U.S., Kurdish and Iraqi forces freed around 70 hostages from an ISIS-controlled prison who the Pentagon said were facing “imminent mass execution.”
On September 7, 2005, Delta Force assault team landed in MH-6 Little Bird helicopters at an isolated farmhouse outside Baghdad, Roy Hallums, an American contractor, and another hostage were being held were found and rescued
On June 8, 2004, in Objective Medford, US Army's Delta Force rescued 4 hostages in Iraq. Helmet cam footage was leaked and is available on the internet.
These are just a few that happened to gain publicity. Most are kept secret.
Actually no, the Marines or any US fighting force for that matter wanted this thing. It was even recommended that the program be canceled in light of its ongoing problems.
The reason that didn’t happen is because Congress was lobbied by the company which intervened and ordered more of them.
... the gear chipping phenomenon is not new, and the report ultimately blamed the aircraft, rather than the aircrew, as the primary cause of the crash. The report also found that the crew’s actions contributed to the crash. The report found they should have diverted earlier in the flight but delayed an attempted emergency landing despite repeated and escalating warnings in the cockpit. But the gear chipping phenomenon is not new, and the report ultimately blamed the aircraft, rather than the aircrew, as the primary cause of the crash. The chipping issue is common enough that the aircraft has a system designed to detect and clear the chips.
Conley compared the chip warnings to “a check engine light in your car.” The crew received six so-called “chip burn” warnings. When the aircrew decided to divert, they did not choose the closest airfield, and after the third chip burn warning, the aircraft was just 10 miles from the nearest airfield. ... Conley said the crew likely faced “internal pressure” to complete the mission. “We ask crew members to make a million decisions, and sometimes seemingly mundane decisions or easy ones end up being consequential, and in this case, a series of decisions resulted in them extending the flight longer than they should have,” he said. [airandspaceforces dot com]
So, the warning light was not uncommon, but the crew should have known that six times was one too many!
This reminds me of the super puma helicopters where there had been a change which added chip collecting magnets upstream of the electric chip detectors coupled with a similar attitude that 'the odd chip is OK'. The result being the helicopter and its rotor parting company in flight.
The point where the aircraft designers BUILT IN A WHOLE SYSTEM to detect that the gears were eating themselves up was the logical place to stop the whole program and say, "Bad idea, let's go back to something more reliable." The fact that this didn't happen says a lot about how organizations can lock themselves into pursuing a bad idea rather than just scrapping it.
Full agreement with the poster pointing out that a flock of A-10s is more cost-effective. From what I've read, the A-10 isn't glamorous enough for the Air Force, but the folks who really hate it are the ones in its gunsights.
This is one of those engineering concepts that looks great in comics or in a funding proposal, assuming they class as different publications, but in reality it requires too many bleeding edge technologies. My Father was peripherally involved in some of the tilt technology and always said that the tip noise was going to be the least of the issues on board. While this concept may be great for small drones, it is not one which scales up very well as a number of the stresses went up exponentially rather than as a linear function as size increased. Once you put on airframe hours you approach the point where you no longer know enough about the condition of each component without continually strip-down inspections which create additional risks as over-maintenance is an actual thing even ignoring the flying hours vs repair hours ratio.
There was a better option which would have been to use the concept of the Fairey Rotodyne from the 50's which had all the elements which Osprey was supposed to cover but with a much lower level of complexity
Well, the tandem rotors are fixed to a solid-ish airframe. In a tiltrotor they're on some long wobbly stub wings, those stub wings have big hinges that have to take the full lift/thrust, and the transition from vertical to forward orientation is anything but simple. And that's the obvious stuff. At a structural and systems level there will be vastly more complications, as one example the fuel and control connections to engines that swing. The whole tiltrotor concept could be summed up as "nice idea, now come up with something practical". And having not really got much out of the the Osprey programme than some big bills, the Pentagon are now doubling down in the hope of an even more complex, higher performance tiltrotor to replace the proven robustness and practicality of the Black Hawk, and that inevitably is going to cost a fortune (and a few lives in development through to early service).
Interestingly, in respect of the Fairey Rotodyne, the Sikorsky-Boeing design that the Pentagon turned down had some aspects in common (fixed rotors and separate forward propulsion). I suppose the Pentagon are just a bunch of magpies, forever attracted to glitter and novelty, without any concept of value.
Well, the US supersonic bomber, the B1-B has swing wings, as do the European Tornado aircraft and the Grumman F14 'Tomcat' fighter which all use hydraulics to operate the wing-mounted control surfaces (flaps, slots, ailerons drops etc.), so there is some experience of reasonably reliable hydraulic connections to moving wings. However, none of those has a rotating engine mounted on the wing, and the wings did not rotate on an axis along the length of the wing.
Large commercial aircraft typically have fuel tanks in the wings, so I wonder whether the Osprey wings are a great deal more complicated than normal, even than a swing-wing aircraft. el Reg engineers / boffins / nerds*, please advise.
*There is nothing wrong with being a nerd, I have been called a nerd myself, and Bill Gates, I believe, advised students to be nice the the nerds because they'd probably end up working for one.
No, the Chinook has two engines, both driving both rotors, so there is some redundancy in the event of engine failure. For the record, the rotors on a Chinook are linked together by a drive shaft to keep them in sync, because they overlap, and non-synchronised rotors would end up with the blades clashing even if you didn't tilt the rotors as part of controlling the aircraft, because helicopter rotor blades are really quite flexible.
Similarly, the V22 motors are also linked by a drive shaft, so that one engine can drive both rotors in the event of an engine failure. Unfortunately, that drive shaft just adds to the complexity of the V22, and has to be designed to work with the wings drooping downwards due to self weight at engine start up and being bent upwards in a curve when pulling a positive G manoeuvre. This problem does not exist for the Chinook.
Very interesting read. Sadly, the Rotodyne suffers (like helicopters) from forward flight airspeed limitation due to main rotor forward transonic drag and retreating blade stall. It was hoped that tilt rotors would not have that same limitation but it appears they have a whole number of others.
There is nothing wrong with a tilting rotor design, but you have to run them from the same engine, with drive shafts and right-angle bevel gears. If each rotor has its own engine, you not only double the source of failure, but cause a failure to immediately be so asymmetric as to not be survivable. An Osprey will immediately crash if one engine does out.
there is something fundamentally wrong with tilt rotors : the sizes for propellers optimized for lifting purposes, and those ideal for forward thrusting are completely different.
For small drones that is easy to solve : use 6 engines for lift, and have 2 of them tilting, so for forward flight you block the 4 unused motors and only use the 2 tilting ones. In this case, you can have 6 identical propellers, where only 2 are used for forward motion. There are many delivery drones operating like that. But having 2 giant lifting propellers which become 2 giant forward thrusting propellers is *aerodynamically* a bad choice. It's independent on the mechanical implementation, it's an aerodynamic airflow problem. The Osprey v22 is good for Pandora, not for Earth.
Good sensible analysis and all very correct I'm sure, but the Osprey is too god-damn cool for common sense. The fact it exists and can fly and is only grounded some of the time is enough to prove all the doubters wrong.
Fairey Rotodyne very cool too, in that quaint way everything from that era is. It would have made a great Thunderbirds vehicle or an eccentric character in Jimbo and the Jet-Set.
Ospreys are totally unreliable. Two engines ensures they will all crash eventually since all engines eventually will fail, and a mismatch of one running while one is not running will cause an Osprey to immediately spin and crash. The only way to prevent that is by synching the 2 propellers on the same engine with drive shafts and bevel gears. But then you have a whole different vehicle.
Two engines ensures they will all crash eventually since all engines eventually will fail, and a mismatch of one running while one is not running will cause an Osprey to immediately spin and crash.
You keep saying this, but obviously you have no clue about what you are talking about. Spend just 30 seconds reading the Wikipedia article on the V-22.
I'll make it easy for you: Osprey Design Note the item labeled "Transmission Interconnect Shaft".
Is there still a real war-time use case for these flying troop carriers (small, big, heli, airplanes and hybrides) ?
When you see how the battlefield is now on the Ukraine front.. Slow big flying non stealth targets ... even quite far from the battlefield are pop-out with cheap drones or with +400km range air-to-air missiles.
-> Ka-52 are hunted successfully by drones https://x.com/clashreport/status/1856395480022040685
Sure it can be done, but there are far more effective ways to spend the money to get results.
Troops on the ground gets troops killed.
Helis supporting troops only means more troops get put in places they shouldnt be. Troops die, get injuried and helis get destroyed trying to support.
The R in Afghan learnt this the hard way, the same is true in Ukraine, America is also losing lots of Ospreys and its not even war time. In vietnam a lot of US troops were killed/injuried because they were sent on stsupid missions because the leaders believed in helis.
How long was the war in Iraq and Afghanistan ? Years and all the Ospreys only managed 5000 flight hours and you think thats good ?
I'm not arguing that the V-22 is good. It was in trouble before they finished testing it. Kind of like the F-35. My point was that the designers were smart enough to realize a COMBAT aircraft could lose an engine, and they aren't just going to fall out of the air because of it. But the OP kept posting that stupidity over and over.
It did make a great Thunderbirds vehicle. Something like it appears on several episodes.
But before people get all dewey eyed on Fairley it side-stepped the twisting problem by using tip mounted jets, with the fuel partly pumped by the rotation of the rotors themselves. Something like it was planned for the older "Rotary Rocket" concept.
Now you've got to deal with a complex, high speed fluid joint and changing blade incidence in flight (IE Cyclic and collective pitch change).
AIUI it also made a hell of a noise.
Exactly.
The early X vehicle on which it was based was about the size of the UH-1.
Bell, the mfg had a rep for low-bidding the contract then "discovering" problems that needed to fixed. IOW the classic way to game a cost-plus contract. TBF they did a pretty good job on the engine for the Agena stage (An Aluminum combustion chamber with gun-drilled cooling passages was pretty crafty).
The big discovery was that you needed to cross connect the engine module so both rotors keep flying (also done on the Chinnock, but there it's a fairly simple 1 piece shaft) and that "shaft" is in fact a 19 segment subsystem with 3 gearboxes (one of which overheats if the V22 stays in vertical flight too long). Making the rotors fold (AFAIK no other helicopter does this,and I'm not sure any propeller driven aircraft, even carrier based ones ever needed it either) massively raised the development cost. IIRC it's now > $60Bn, which was about what the Shuttle cost in current year (or near current year) $.
TBF very few mfg's were left in the US helicopter market, Sikorsky and Bell being basically it for military stuff. The other option tried (tilt wing) meant an even larger chunk of structure had to be moved, and the wing acted like a huge sail in high winds.
There is (in principle) at least one much better way to handle the problem, but no one seems to have pursued it, and they probably never will.
Yes, but they’re designed for defence and attack optimisation, not for keeping the neighbours sweet!
Unfortunately the two goals are often mutually exclusive, and unfortunately for you in this case. You have my empathy, but needs must…
For the record, I have to personally endure Swiss Airforce F-18s screaming low over my mountain “retreat” on a regular basis, together with the occasional sonic boom from an overly enthusiastic trainee fighter pilot, which is akin to a bomb going off next door!!
…But at least I feel “safe and secure” by it all. Honestly…
> For the record, I have to personally endure Swiss Airforce F-18s screaming low over my mountain “retreat” on a regular basis,
You don't run a hotel in Unterbach do you?
The crash was not caused by a software glitch, but broken teeth in a gearbox.
On a normal helicopter that would not cause a crash and you would just freewheel until you auto gyro to the ground. But when you have 2 engines and one is thrusting while the other is freewheeling, then a crash is inevitable.
Is it intentional that this looks like something I might have designed?
Outside of the domain of folded paper, I have no skill or insight on designing aircraft.
That said, I could imagine conjuring up something that went straight up, a long long way, then bolted towards the ground while the wing + engine re-oriented 1/4 turn as the pilot pulled it out of a death dive.
Is that really all there is to aircraft design?
I might have something to offer.
Note the US Army isn't involved in the V-22 program, too complex and too expensive. In light of recent real world experiences in Ukraine the Army has scaled back the FLRAA Valor program and canned the FARA program for a new scout chopper. Instead they're going for an updated Blackhawk and drones with less Valors. They'll used for special missions (still a huge order but not replacing Blackhawks 1 for 1). Also NAVAIR is going to need to keep those old C-2 Greyhounds running for COD missions for a bit longer if all the new shiny CMV-22B replacements are grounded.
The tilt-rotor is a deathtrap. They should've used four jet engines or electric motors powered by multiple turbine generators.
How many young soldiers and pilots have been killed by this billion dollar boondoggle? Many people were killed during its development but Boeing kept claiming the problems would be solved before it went operational. We now know they haven't.
This is the Space Shuttle drama all over again. How many people will have to die before the politicians finally pull the plug?
.. and the US cannot?
(See DO-29)
Length of the Do 29 was 9.5 meters (31 feet 2 inches), wingspan was 13.2 meters (43 feet 4 inches), and empty weight was 2,180 kilograms (4,805 pounds). Initial flight was on 12 December 1958. The Do 29s demonstrated outstanding short-field performance, even though the props were never tilted below 60 degrees from the horizontal. However, Dornier did nothing more with the idea after the end of Do 29 flight tests. One remains on display in Germany.
Which is when this very long journey started.
It seemed a simple idea, but as it evolved through long flight testing it turns out it's not simple to make it work.
The whole weight distribution means if anything happens s**t can go sideways very quickly. Imagine for example one of those rotors over solid ground and the other side over a cliff face, massive difference in effective lift --> positive feedback of engine pods on wing tips (which have to be much stronger in turn) --> loss of control (yes something like that has happened).
The V22 (and it's predecessors) is a poor design partly because it's not what it's claimed to be, a tilt-rotor but a tilt-engine pod instead.
Hind-sight is always 20/20 but if they had actually delivered a tilt-rotor, with engines keep in the fuselage and just the rotors rotating the big engine masses would stay inboard over the fuselage, the wing would have been lighter, the cross-drive shaft would have probably been a short rigid single piece component and the assorted jiggery-pokery needed to twirl the rotors through 90deg and control their cyclic and collective pitches (and later fold them) would have been about the same.
And yes "right size" for rotors to do VTOL and cruise is different and would always be a compromise, but there are a lot of turboprops that will leave a helio in the dust. The Tu95 hitting 830Kmh as a reminder of what is possible (and has been since the mid 1950's. No actual helicopter comes anywhere close.
But I guess we will never know if that would have caused as many (but different) problems as the V22 has.