As an aside, the Osprey has just been cleared back into service after a three month fleetwide grounding due to the recent Air Force CV-22B crash in Japan.
No fix has been found for what brought down the CV-22B, but rest assured that the program office has deemed the V-22s airworthy again.
My source confirm this story is TRUE. Virtually the FIRST time from this bunch.
Glad the US isn’t having airplane issues!
Looks like the Soviet copy of the C-141.
For a lot of my career, I did failure analysis on military equipment. Lots of times I was dealing with a lump of melted metal and charcoal. There was this absolute political requirement to get to the root cause and find a “permanent” corrective action so the failure would never occur again. In my opinion, it was a stupid requirement as all political requirements are. It just wasn’t possible from the available evidence. So, we often ended up attributing the failure to something we could fix. Often the “fix” was to “retrain the operators.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. The failure review board would look at me like I was a bug crawling out from under a rock. Justifiably so. The figurative gavel would fall, and the incident was over...until it happened again.
The people with that plane have no other choice as they have a mission to perform and that’s the tool they have. Is the tool flawed? Probably. Will it fail again and kill more people? Probably. Is there anything the military can do about it? Probably not. So, they’re back to flying. What choice do they have?
Wrong. The failure mechanism has been identified and a time controlled replacement schedule for that component has been set at 800 flight hours.