SAN DIEGO — The V-22 Osprey has long legs, but the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force tiltrotor fleets have been on a short leash since a fatal 2023 crash led to operational restrictions.
Naval Air Systems Command lifted a three-month grounding last March after eight airmen died when an Air Force MV-22B crashed off the coast of Japan. Now the Navy and Marine Corps can fly the Ospreys, but under limitations that cut into the usefulness of the aircraft.
The Bell-Boeing Osprey is meant to operate with a range of 1,150 nautical miles – the distance from Washington, D.C. to Omaha, Neb. Now the military must make do with the 30-minute flight restriction that translates to about 200 nautical miles – a trip from D.C. to New York.
“There are some days that they don’t have an opportunity to fly because of where the aircraft carrier’s operating,” Capt. Drew Beard, the deputy commodore of the Navy’s Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Wing, recently told reporters. “And they just incorporate that into their plan.”
The initial grounding put the kibosh on aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt’s (CVN-71) first CMV-22B Osprey deployment and USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72)’s second. Both carriers field F-35C Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and the CMV-22B was designed specifically to carry the fighter jet’s engine.
The limitations have made training harder for the units that rely on the Ospreys, forcing them to think creatively about how to use them.
“You had pilots and air crewmen who were banking on going away, getting lots of experience, getting qualified,” Beard said. “And instead of doing that, they sat here and couldn’t train and couldn’t fly.”
Instead, both carriers deployed with C2-A Greyhounds, the aging carrier onboard delivery platform that the CMV-22B Osprey is meant to replace. The C-2s are set to leave the fleet in 2026 and the Navy has not signaled the service plans to extend the aircraft.
The Marine Expeditionary Units that embark on the Navy’s amphibious warships also had to adjust due to the flight restrictions.
“For us, we had a small window to be able to return to flight – meaning going through that syllabus to the point where we had met the requirements but also had the confidence that what we were going to execute was within the prescribed training,” Col. Todd Mahar, the commanding officer of the 24th MEU, told reporters last week.
The Marine Corps program of record calls for 360 MV-22Bs. The range and speed of the tilt-rotors are key to the Marines’ current amphibious assault doctrine that their embarked MEUs are built around. No other aircraft can meet the speed and range of the Ospreys and can land like a helicopter.
Both the Navy and the Marine Corps have few options other than to get the Osprey working, as each service will fly the aircraft well into the 2040s with no real replacement available.
New Risk, New Rules
NAVAIR instituted the tiltrotor restrictions after Air Force MV-22B GUNDUM 22 crashed off the coast of Yakushima Island on Nov. 29, 2023, killing eight airmen. The subsequent investigation found that a flawed gearbox’s catastrophic failure caused the crash.
Before the GUNDUM 22 crash, V-22 pilots had ample discretion on how to read warnings from the gearbox’s chip detector and how soon they would need to land the aircraft following signs the gearbox could be failing. The investigation concluded that Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy operators interpreted the aircraft’s Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization guide differently, according to Beard.
“We updated our NATOPS procedures and put out guidance to all the pilots and aircrew to let them know exactly what, in this case, a chip detector – chip burn – meant and how they should treat it, whereas before I would say there was a lot more discretion that was left in terms of the pilot judgment [or] air crew judgment,” Beard said. on that, in terms of executing the procedures.”
Beard is second in command of the Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission (VRM) Wing unit that oversees the three Navy Osprey squadrons and is charged with training V-22 pilots and crew. Following the 2023 crash, he said the services altered their training on how to gauge the risk of chips in the gearing. Operators and maintainers were used to seeing chips on the gearbox, Beard said. The new guidance is more conservative.
The gearbox is considered safer after the aircraft has flown more than 400 hours. After that many hours in the aircraft, the likelihood of the part being defective is lower, USNI News has learned. Eleven U.S. Navy Ospreys, or about one-third of the current CMV-22B fleet, have met that requirement. Those 11 aircraft are not subject to the same limitations as the Ospreys that have flown fewer than 400 hours.
“We can take those out to ships, we can carry passengers with them, we can fly over the water,” Beard said referring to the aircraft under the NAVAIR restrictions.
“And they are only limited by the 30-minute restriction.”
“The other airplanes, which have fewer than 400 hours, essentially become training assets. So we can fly with them, we can do lots of stuff, but we can’t carry passengers and we can’t go to ships,” he continued. “So the majority of our training is actually just preparing for that thing. I would say it impacts us, but so far we’ve been able to work around it by scheduling the right aircraft.”
The U.S. Navy plans to buy 48 CMV-22Bs to replace its C2-A Greyhounds, which Navy officials say they still plan to sundown in 2026 after more than 60 years in the fleet.
The Marine Corps, which uses medium-lift MV-22B squadrons for assault support, has already purchased 360 of its version of the Osprey. The Marines, for their part, are evaluating how to use sensors to make the gearbox on the MV-22Bs more reliable, according to the service’s 2025 aviation plan released last week.
“A more refined Triple-Melt steel will be the source material for the internal components of the [proprotor gearbox] which will drastically reduce the likelihood of material defects in critical gears and bearings,” the plan reads.
Current Operations
The Navy has prioritized fielding CMV-22Bs to West Coast-based squadrons that deploy on the West Coast-based carriers. VRM-40, which is based in Norfolk, Va., and trains the East Coast-based pilots and crew, received its first CMV-22B in April 2024. To date, the East Coast carriers have yet to deploy with an Osprey squadron and the next carrier – USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) – will leave Norfolk this summer with C2-A Greyhounds.
The “Titans” of VRM-30, the West Coast V-22 squadron, have a detachment of four Ospreys currently aboard USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), which is operating in the Celebes Sea. Those aircraft are flying within NAVAIR’s limitations, unable to fly more than 30 minutes away from a divert field.
“The deployed assets are under [U.S.] 7th Fleet operational control and if they wanted to have a different interpretation of what those rules are, they can,” Beard said. “But within what we restrict our aircraft to, we define a suitable divert as a runway with instrument approach and I think at least 3,000 feet.”
During the three-month grounding, the deployed 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit received special permission to operate the Ospreys in a potential non-combatant evacuation of Lebanon after the Hamas attacks in southern Israel.
The 24th MEU was conducting pre-deployment training last year during the initial grounding and used CH-53E heavy-lift helicopters for assault support. Once NAVAIR lifted the grounding in March, the MEU had limited time to exercise with the Ospreys before deploying in June with the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group, but still took the MV-22Bs out to the Baltic and Mediterranean seas.
“Throughout the deployment, we also utilized the MV-22s for their range,” said Mahar, the 24th MEU CO. The MEU’s Ospreys flew more than 1,000 nautical miles from west of the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap to Sweden, stopping for fuel along the way.
“They were able to support a lot of the different events during BALTOPS that we weren’t going to be able to do had they not forward deployed,” Mahar said.
Meanwhile, the 15th MEU was the first to recertify the Ospreys after the grounding ended, according to Col. Sean Dynan, the MEU’s commanding officer. Ahead of the planned April deployment, the squadron flew 398 hours in 30 days to get qualified.
In October, the Wasp ARG and 15th MEU provided the Philippines with humanitarian aid after Typhoon Krathon. After the relief efforts, the Ospreys flew 430 nautical miles over the Sulu Sea to Palawan to join the Kamandag 8 exercise. Because the route was littered with divert airfields, the MEU’s aircraft weren’t affected by NAVAIR’s limitations, Dynan told reporters.
Training Deficiency
Beard acknowledged the grounding created a training deficiency in the Navy’s Osprey community. The service is currently shifting around pilots who are experienced in other aircraft to get more Osprey flight hours.
“That’s something that we are trying to address right now,” he said. “But some of that is stuff that we’re never going to be able to recapture.”
Even when the limitations are lifted, the Navy still has work to do on Osprey maintenance. Because the Osprey is the first aircraft of its kind in the military, the Navy is developing the institutional knowledge among its maintainers and pilots that exists in the helicopter and fighter communities.
“Up until very recently, any person who came into one of our squadrons had never worked on a V-22 before,” Beard said. “They’re starting from scratch.”
“This is completely different from any other aircraft out there and many of the skills do not translate,” he continued. “It takes an inordinately long amount of time to qualify somebody on this aircraft that is somewhat unique in naval aviation.”
The Navy has finally reached a point where maintainers who began training five or six years ago can support squadrons, Beard said.
“That is awesome, and we need to figure out how to do more of that.”
