Push to rush V-22 into war questioned

With U.S. special forces preparing to go into Afghanistan to hunt terrorists, it would seem this is just the kind of campaign for which the V-22 Osprey was designed.

But some leading aerospace engineers and former combat helicopter pilots say that if the V-22 is rushed into action, the aircraft could pose a significant danger. And Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge said Tuesday that the V-22 will not be ready for flight tests until April or May next year.

"It is my view it needs two years of flight testing before we can answer the question of whether of not this is a reliable, safe, operationally suitable aircraft," Aldridge told Bloomberg News.

Even after nearly 20 years of development and $13 billion in expenditures, critics say the V-22 still has serious, fundamental safety problems that are being glossed over by the program's backers.

"It's very premature to be thinking about using the V-22 in any operational situation, let alone in Afghanistan," said J. Gordon Leishman, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Maryland's rotorcraft research center.

The V-22, Leishman and others say, seems to have basic flight control problems that make it very difficult to fly in all but the tamest conditions.

"It's a very unforgiving airplane," a Defense Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If you make a mistake, you die."

At the moment, the V-22 isn't flying anywhere. The dozen or so production and test aircraft now in the hands of the Marines, Navy and Air Force have been grounded since December after two crashes in eight months that killed 23 Marines.

But last week, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., a long-time supporter of the oft-troubled V-22 program, said the problems that caused those crashes are almost fixed and the aircraft could be ready for use in 30 to 60 days.

"That bird is ready to go, and we should get it up in the air," said Weldon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on military procurement.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Jones also has been lobbying Congress, saying the V-22 could be ready for action early next year if additional funds were made available.

Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, agreed with Weldon that "we really do need it right now," but she also said it is important that the V-22 be proven to be safe.

The V-22 is a joint project of Bell Helicopter Textron of Fort Worth and the Boeing Co.'s helicopter division based in Ridley Township, Pa., adjacent to Weldon's district. About one-third of Bell's 6,000 Fort Worth-area employees work on the program.

Almost since the V-22 was conceived in the early 1980s, its backers have promised that the aircraft would be the ideal tool for special operations missions. It would be faster than helicopters and fly farther without refueling, enabling it to take troops into remote and rugged locations.

The big selling point for the V-22 is its ability to take off and land vertically like a helicopter and then, by rotating its engines, fly with the speed of an airplane. That's also the root of its problems.

Critics say that when the V-22 is being operated like a helicopter, it has limited ability to maneuver and is highly susceptible to rotor stalls and other flight problems that can result in fatal accidents.

The V-22 "is a lousy helicopter. If you fly it outside the envelope, it will bite you," said Leishman, using the aviation term for an aircraft's flight limits. "And they don't yet know what the envelope is."

Bell, Boeing, and the Navy don't agree with Leishman.

Company officials declined to be interviewed for this article, citing possible lawsuits stemming from the crashes. Bell officials provided a written document, compiled in cooperation with the Navy and Boeing, that says the V- 22 is as maneuverable as comparable helicopters and does not have a problem with stalls.

The plane's critics, however, say that when the V-22 is flown like a helicopter, the twin rotors can barely generate enough lift to hold the heavy aircraft aloft, particularly when it's loaded with fuel and troops. While hovering near the ground or flying at low speeds the rotor blades cannot generate enough extra lift to maneuver the aircraft

"If you try to maneuver like any military aircraft has to do, you run into a very unsafe situation," said Alfred Gessow, the founder and former director of the Maryland research center and a former NASA researcher.

If a pilot in combat encounters enemy fire and tries to maneuver sharply at low speeds, Gessow and others say the V-22 is likely to stall with disastrous results. Gessow said that is an inherent safety flaw: "You can't change some locknuts and make it go away."

Bell disagrees. Its document states, "There is no `flaw' in the V-22's prop rotor system."

The aircraft's critics, the document says, are basing their opinions on inaccurate "information, premises, [and] reasoning."

The V-22 also has been criticized by an informal group of active and retired engineers and helicopter pilots, many with combat experience, who have been passing their observations along to Pentagon officials and members of Congress.

The group calls itself the "Red Ribbon Panel," a reference to the Pentagon's official "Blue Ribbon Panel" that reviewed, and endorsed, the V-22 program this year.

Harry Dunn, a retired Air Force helicopter pilot and engineer who acts as coordinator for the group, said he and a number of former colleagues became alarmed because they felt the Blue Ribbon Panel had ignored the V- 22's lack of maneuverability and propensity to stall.

"There was not a single person on that panel who knew anything about helicopters," Dunn said.

The panel's scientific adviser, Eugene Covert, a professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at MIT, declined to comment on V-22 stall and safety issues for this article.

Although they differ on exact details, the V-22 critics agree that the Osprey's aerodynamic problems stem from its basic design - namely its rotors, which also serve as propellers.

"What you have is a severely compromised aircraft that is neither fish nor fowl," said Gessow, whose textbook, `Aerodynamics of the Helicopter,' was first published in 1952 and is still considered one of the leading texts.

Although the three blades of each rotor are 19 feet long, huge by comparison with the propellers on a turboprop airplane, they're small compared with those on a similar-size helicopter.

As a result, critics say, in helicopter mode, the V-22's rotors have to work much harder than those on a helicopter to generate the same level of force. The blades also have a much higher degree of twist than those on a helicopter, which, under some flight conditions, creates nasty air flows that make it easier for the V-22 to stall, or lose lift.

The V-22's side-by-side, wing-mounted engine design exacerbates its stall problem, the critics say. With the engines and rotors at the end of the wings it's almost inevitable, they say, that when the aircraft gets into troublesome flight conditions one rotor will stall, causing the aircraft to roll.

Bell disagrees with the criticisms.

"The people making these assertions lack the requisite knowledge of the aircraft, its rotor system and its performance envelope," the document provided by the company states.

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© 2001 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas