How the V-22 Osprey’s crash history earned it the nickname of ‘the widow-maker’

The MV-22 was designed to replace aging military helicopters like the CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Sea Stallion as costly maintenance strained the Navy’s budget and to blend their critical capabilities.

In 1980, a fleet of Sea Stallions and C-130 aircraft were deployed on a high-stakes mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, but an intense dust storm on the airstrip caused a Sea Stallion to crash into a C-130, killing eight service members and dooming the mission.

In the wake of the ill-fated operation, the military recognized the need for a new aircraft — one that could surpass the capabilities of the Sea Stallion and Sea Knight. At the 1981 Paris Air Show, then-Navy Secretary John Lehman saw early models of the Bell XV-15, which led to the development of the V-22 Osprey.

The new tiltrotor aircraft boasted the versatility of a helicopter with the range and speed of a turboprop plane, convincing Lehman to push the aircraft through the acquisition process.

In 1983, the Navy awarded Bell and Boeing a joint contract for $68.7 million.

The V-22 Osprey can carry two dozen troops and, in some configurations, as many as 32 people, or 10,000 pounds of cargo, and fly to long ranges at altitudes of up to 25,000 feet.

The development wasn’t smooth, though. Cost overruns in the process plagued the V-22 as the development budget ballooned well past the ceiling price of the initial contract.

In 1990, the secretary of defense recommended canceling the V-22 program to reallocate the funds, but Congress denied the request and pushed through with the V-22, according to a 1991 report from the Government Accountability Office.

As the development budget increased and concern surrounding the Osprey’s viability grew, the Marine Corps held a special test flight in Washington to secure congressional approval.

In 1992, six years after the initial contract was awarded to Bell and Boeing, 40 Marines, Navy officers, and Bell-Boeing representatives gathered at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, to witness the experimental V-22 Osprey in flight.

However, while the V-22 was rotating its engines and propellers to begin its descent, the right engine ignited, causing it to crash into the Potomac River — about a half mile short of the runway. All seven passengers — three Marines and four Boeing employees — were killed in the crash.

A Navy investigation into the incident found that “the primary cause of the mishap was a flammable fluid leak which was ingested by the right engine.”

Production and further testing of the V-22 Osprey continued but with tenuous support from Congress. But there continued to be fatal incidents.

In 2000, the Marines were holding a weapons training course aboard two Ospreys, flying from Yuma airbase in Arizona to Marana Regional Airport, located 25 miles outside Tuscon, when disaster struck.

The first aircraft — call sign Nighthawk 71 — started its descent 2,000 feet too high and began a rapid deceleration, hitting the runway hard but ultimately landing unscathed. The second Osprey — call sign Nighthawk 72 — also began its descent at an unsafe altitude, dropping 2,000 feet per minute at a speed just under 45 mph.

Toward the end of its rapid descent, Nighthawk 72 lost lift in its right rotor, roughly 245 feet above the ground, causing the aircraft to stall and roll. The Osprey then crashed and exploded, killing all 19 Marines on board.

In an 8,000-page crash report, the Corps said that “human factors” were the primary cause of the crash. The report stopped short of attributing the cause to pilot error, but the head of Marine aviation said at a press briefing at the time “that the pilot of the ill-fated aircraft significantly exceeded the rate of descent established by regulations for safe flight.”

“Apparently, neither pilot recognized the danger presented by their high rate of descent and low forward airspeed, which is the same in any helicopter that you fly,” Fred McCorkle, then a Marine Corps lieutenant general, said.

“Unfortunately, the pilot’s drive to accomplish that mission appears to have been the fatal flaw,” he added.

Another investigation by the GAO later found that, in the rush to push the Osprey into full-scale production, the Navy failed to perform critical developmental testing on the aircraft. The oversight, it said, ultimately made the aircraft vulnerable to turbulence known as the “vortex ring state,” a potentially fatal turbulence caused by a helicopter’s rapid descent and low speed pushing disturbed air through its blades.

Although the vortex ring state is a known risk for helicopter pilots, it wasn’t clear at the time if the same warnings would apply to the first-of-its-kind Osprey.

It wasn’t until 15 years later that the Department of Defense issued a corrective statement after years of protest from the families of the late pilots, Marine Maj. Brooks Gruber and Lt. Col. John Brow. The Pentagon said that “they had neither the knowledge nor the training to avert the crash.”

Learning from that tragedy, future Ospreys were fitted with alerts and alarms to help prevent a repeat occurrence, and pilots and crews were put through proper training programs.

By the summer of 2000, the military’s V-22 project was $3 billion over budget and eight years behind schedule, and it had already been involved in the deaths of nearly two dozen people.

Some Congress members and then-incoming Vice President Dick Cheney, who previously opposed the V-22 program as defense secretary, began looking for ways to kill the project entirely because of the rising costs and technological issues.

With mounting pressure to produce results, officials working on the V-22 project began cutting corners and falsifying information.

“We need to lie or manipulate the data, or however you wanna call it,” Odin Leberman, then a lieutenant colonel and Osprey squadron commander at the Corps’ New River air base in Florida, said in a meeting, which was secretly recorded by a maintenance crew member, CNN reported in 2001.

On December 11, 2000, tragedy struck yet again. Ten miles outside Jacksonville, North Carolina, a V-22 Osprey crashed in a remote area during an approach landing exercise, falling 1,600 feet and killing all four Marines on board.

The crash report indicated that, during the training mission, the reset button on board the Osprey lit up, prompting the pilots to push it at least eight or 10 times in an attempt to correct the aircraft.

But constant resetting “started a chain of unpredicted and uncontrollable events that caused alternating deceleration and acceleration of the aircraft,” Martin Berndt, then a Marine Corps major general, told reporters at the Pentagon.

A common design problem on the V-22s was chafing in the hydraulic system, which sometimes resulted in hydraulic lines rupturing. To compensate for this problem, the pilots hit the reset button. Investigators later discovered that a glitch in the aircraft’s software caused the plane to decelerate with each press of the button, resulting in the crash.

On December 12, 2000, the V-22 Osprey was grounded for the first — but not the last — time.

Despite its initial controversies, the V-22 Osprey was fielded in 2007. The Marines and the Air Force were among the first to use the plane in 2007 and 2008, respectively. The Navy did not begin using the V-22 Osprey until 2021.

During the decade that began in 2010, the V-22 Osprey killed eight people across eight crashes as a result of continued technological and hardware issues.

In 2010, only three years after its official launch, an Osprey’s engine stalled while preparing to drop off a squad of US Army Rangers in southern Afghanistan, causing the plane to descend rapidly.

The pilot was able to land the aircraft to reduce the severity of impact, but the nose of the plane crashed into the sand and flipped it over, killing four of the 20 passengers on board.

An Air Force investigator initially attributed the deadly crash to engine problems, but the decision was later overruled by his superior officer, changing the primary cause of the crash to pilot error.

Donald Harvel, then a brigadier general with the Air Force and lead investigator in the crash probe, told Air Force Times that he felt “a lot of pressure” to change his report.

“I turned [my report] in, and I knew that my career was done,” Harvel told Wired in 2012.

A spokesperson for the Air Force Special Operations Command at the time denied that he was pressured by higher-ranking Air Force officers to shift the blame away from the Osprey.

On June 8, 2022, an Osprey — call sign Swift 11 — crashed in Southern California as a result of a hard clutch engagement, killing five Marines on board. The issue was first made public after the Swift 11 crash, but it had been identified as a fleet-wide problem as early as 2010.

During a hard clutch engagement (HCE), “the clutch momentarily slips from its position connecting the engine to one propeller’s rotor gearbox and then reengages, often severely damaging key components of the dual-engine aircraft and causing it to lurch,” a Marine Corps investigation into the incident said.

The Marines said the issue behind the malfunctioning clutch was largely due to the aircraft’s input quill assembly, a crucial component that transfers engine power to the rotor gearbox. The service said they would replace or upgrade the part to mitigate the hard clutch issue.

However, the Swift 11 investigation revealed that the aircraft’s quills were consistently being changed and that simply replacing them wouldn’t fully resolve the underlying issues with the clutch system.

A series of safety mishaps involving the Osprey’s clutch prompted AFSOC to briefly ground its fleet of Ospreys until the issue was resolved.

A year later, another V-22 crashed during a training exercise in Australia, injuring twenty and killing three Marines.

In November 2023, a V-22 Osprey crashed off the coast of Japan, killing eight airmen. The crash resulted in the US military grounding the entire V-22 Osprey fleet to solve the problems.

A highly anticipated Air Force investigation found that a “catastrophic” gearbox failure and the crew’s “lack of urgency throughout the entire mishap sequence” were to blame for the tragic crash.

Warning lights alerted the aircrew during the flight that metal chips were flaking off inside the gearbox, but the pilot decided to fly on in accordance with official guidance. Air Force officials, however, have suggested that Osprey program officials failed to communicate the severe risks that these so-called “chip alerts” posed.

Three months later, the Navy and Marine Corps announced the V-22 was cleared to return to the skies just a few months after the entire fleet was grounded — but with strict guidelines.

The aircraft is required to stay within 30 minutes of a suitable airfield or landing zone to divert in case of emergency. The flight restriction put the Navy’s Osprey fleet on the sidelines from being used “for carrier onboard support of deployed aircraft carriers once they have left their homeport,” according to the House Armed Services Committee document.

The Air Force was the last service to resume operations with the Osprey, instead taking a multistep approach to returning its fleet of about 50 CV-22 aircraft to full operation.

The first phase of the Osprey’s return includes ground and simulator training to implement new safety protocols, the second phase two focuses on a multi-month program for aircrew and maintainers, and the final phase is resuming full operation in exercises and deployments.

Families and widows of those who have died in previous Osprey crashes were reluctant to believe the plane was ready to fly again.

Rep. James Comer, a chairman of the House Oversight Committee, criticized the decision to resume V-22 flights, noting the number of unanswered questions and concerns involving the aircraft.

“Serious concerns remain, such as accountability measures put in place to prevent crashes, a general lack of transparency, how maintenance and operational upkeep is prioritized, and how DoD assesses risks,” Comer said in a statement at the time.

Data from the Navy and Air Force estimated that the Osprey has been involved in about 50 deaths since becoming operational in 2007.

Though the Osprey can now operate in a limited capacity, NAVAIR Commander Vice Adm. Carl Chebi said that his office, which oversees the V-22 program, will continue to review manning, training, and equipment for the aircraft for another six to nine months. He added that the military doesn’t expect to resume full operations of its hundreds of Ospreys until at least 2025.

“As we have findings from the comprehensive review, I will take the necessary actions to ensure continued safe flight operations,” Chebi said during a congressional hearing in June.