The grounding of the U.S. Marine Corps and Air Force V-22 fleet since early December is unlikely to lift soon, as DoD officials consider what measures to take for crew member safety. On Feb. 13, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), said that the command is looking at future CV-22 alternatives, such as those that may stem from the High Speed Vertical Takeoff and Landing (HSVTOL) experiments AFSOC is conducting with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
“Our investigations are still ongoing right now, and it would be premature to share our pathway forward,” he told reporters at the Air Force Association warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo.
“The CV-22 is a long-held requirement since the [1980] Desert One scenario, but there’s also an acknowledgment that the V-22 is 1980s technology,” Bauernfeind said. “As we move forward, what are the future capabilities that will eventually provide the next generation of capability? We are in partnership with DARPA on developing High Speed Vertical Takeoff and Landing, and what would that look like? DARPA solves extremely hard problems, but it also takes time, if they prove a concept, to turn that into production.”
“Nothing is more important to me than the safety of our air commandos, and when the time is right when they make that decision to return to flight [of the CV-22], it will be with me having the full confidence, not only in our training, but our crews as well as the platform and any mitigation measures we have in place to ensure we can react appropriately, if another situation develops,” he said.
The V-22 grounding occurred after a Nov. 29 crash of a CV-22 off the Japanese island of Yakushima that killed all eight airmen aboard–the fourth such crash of a V-22 in 18 months. The string of V-22 fatalities was a turnabout for the aircraft–which, after facing safety setbacks in the first decade of its development–had enjoyed a period of high praise from military commanders for its use in combat theaters.
Last month, the Air Force said that it had recovered the voice and data recorder–the “black box”–from the November CV-22 crash.
Assistant Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney said that the Marine Corps has put in place a correction for V-22 hard clutch engagements “to a 99 percentile eventuality of [hard clutch engagements] not happening with input quill assemblies being replaced at the 800-hour mark and other things that we do to make sure that the airplane is tactically capable, ready and safe” (Defense Daily, Jan. 25).
Boeing [BA] and Textron‘s [TXT] Bell build the V-22 tiltrotor, which carries two Rolls-Royce T406 engines.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the engines “fell significantly short of service life expectancy, lasting less than 400 hours versus the program estimated life of 500-600 hours,” but the V-22 program has said that it made changes to increase engine service life significantly since then, including the fielding of a Block 3 upgrade.