[Yo-Yo]

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.

[Gen.Blather]

“The fix for now will be more often inspection of the hard clutches and more frequent replacement than originally scheduled.”

I agree with you. The Navy would scream at this, but I suspect that simply replacing the entire system with a new or re-manufactured unit every X hours would probably reduce the failure rate to near zero. Future aircraft could be manufactured to facilitate this kind of maintenance. It runs up the operating costs, but what does the loss of an experienced crew, passengers and an entire aircraft cost?