V-22 Osprey: A Flying Shame

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Indeed it does, but that doesn't make the aircraft any safer. The plane's backers said that the chance of a dual-engine failure was so rare that it shouldn't be of concern. Yet the flight manual lists a variety of things that can cause both engines to fail, including "contaminated fuel ... software malfunctions or battle damage." The lone attempted V-22 autorotation "failed miserably," according to an internal 2003 report, obtained by TIME, written by the Institute for Defense Analyses, an in-house Pentagon think tank. "The test data indicate that the aircraft would have impacted the ground at a ... fatal rate of descent."

That prospect doesn't concern some V-22 pilots, who believe they'll have the altitude and time to convert the aircraft into its airplane mode and hunt for a landing strip if they lose power. "We can turn it into a plane and glide it down, just like a C-130," Captain Justin (Moon) McKinney, a V-22 pilot, said from his North Carolina base as he got ready to head to Iraq. "I have absolutely no safety concerns with this aircraft, flying it here or in Iraq."

Helicopter expert Rex Rivolo, who called the decision to deploy the V-22 without proven autorotation capability "unconscionable" in that confidential 2003 Pentagon study, declined to be interviewed. But in his report, Rivolo noted that up to 90% of the helicopters lost in the Vietnam War were in their final approach to landing when they were hit by enemy ground fire. About half of those were able to autorotate safely to the ground, "thereby saving the crews," Rivolo wrote. "Such events in V-22 would all be fatal."

Faced with killing the program — or possibly killing those aboard the V-22 — the Marines have opted to save the plane and have largely shifted responsibility for surviving such a catastrophe from the designers to the pilots. While the engineers spent years vainly trying to solve the problem, pilots aboard a stricken V-22 will have just seconds to react. But tellingly, pilots have never practiced the maneuver outside the simulator — the flight manual forbids it — and even in simulators the results have been less than reassuring. "In simulations," the flight manual warns, "the outcome of the landings varied widely due to the extreme sensitivity to pilot technique and timing." The director of the Pentagon's testing office, in a 2005 report, put it more bluntly. If power is lost when a V-22 is flying like a helicopter below 1,600 ft. (490 m), he said, emergency landings "are not likely to be survivable."