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?
I'm not one of the knee-jerk V-22 bashers that lurk on here. I support the V-22, and its accident rate is on par with other helicopters.
And you're right, the Navy especially has put all of their COD eggs in one V-22 basket, due to the ability of the V-22 to carry the F135 engine without needing disassembly.
The issue with the V-22 seems to be with the clutching system that connects the two engines to a common power shaft to power the two rotors, so that one engine failure will still allow the V-22 to fly, if not hover.
As they wear, these hard clutches seem to engage with a hard shock and that is causing damage to the common power shaft, bringing the aircraft down.
The fix for now will be more often inspection of the hard clutches and more frequent replacement than originally scheduled.
Concur. Every time I hear that the crash was caused by pilot error, my default thought is that they couldn’t figure out what happened. I say this because if you look at the history of almost every military plane, you will see the same pattern: pilot error, pilot error, upgrade, fewer accidents. Additionally, a lot of times when there is a new type of aircraft, e.g. the Harrier or the Osprey, “pilot error” is greatly reduced when they change “pilot training.” Having said that, flying military planes is dangerous, hence “flight pay.”