That’s what I figured, too. But it sure looks ugly when in VTOL or STOL mode, doesn’t it?
Yes. It looks like an in-flight bird strike.
It seems to me that there has been an excess of crashes with the Osprey design, on the way to building a better “mousetrap.” In other words, painful lessons have had to be learned along the way at great cost.
Maybe it’s that they are scrutinized more because of the radical hybrid design.