Japan’s air SDF has decided to stand down all of its Ospreys, and the Japanese government is asking the US to remove all of ours from their airspace. My guess is that we’ll move them out of Yokota AFB and leave them in Okinawa for deployment to Taiwan when necessary, but given the present USAF leadership who knows.
Compare V-22 original performance objectives to actual capabilities......
Stupid design for an aircraft in search of a mission. Outboard rotor lift/propulsion is popular in movies but does not translate well to reality. Scrap this thing and use the money on next gen WartHogs.
In the early 2000s I had the privilege of working on pilot and maintainer training for the USMC V-22. Back then the Marines had at least one fatal crash that I can remember caused by Vortex Ring State, which if I recall correctly can be cause by too fast a rate of descent in tilt rotor aircraft. The USMC hit the pause button on production for a time. This crash sounds like some kind of mechanical failure... RIP to the brave USAF crew aboard this one.
A lot of noise from haters of the V-22. However, I spent 4 years at Yokota AFB and Norton AFB working in communications, so I saw all the safety reports of helicopters in the Pacific theater. In that time, I recall that there were one or two crashes per year of Marine transport choppers traveling between Okinawa and the Japanese main islands.
Crashes happen. You won’t find me voluntarily flying on a helicopter or a tilt-rotor aircraft.
USAF? I thought these were marine planes.