A while back I commented negatively on the V-22 Osprey and took a bit of flack from some loyal and sensible readers. I should mention that I don’t have a great deal of faith in the plane, based solely upon its history to date and my observations about vertical landings in “areas of stress,” as you could say. Opposed vertical landings can get very ugly quite fast.

Some quick notes: the apparent prescribed landing path is a “slow glide” at about nine knots. I take that to mean it’s a gliding down path, like landing a plane, and the nine knots would mean after transition from forward flight to hover in preparation for landing. I guess under those conditions, and at an estimated unit cost of more than $130 million each, you are damned well going to park these babies some distance from a hot LZ, and cargoes, both troops and materiel, will be ported in on foot. Well…….

David Axe has written a column about the plane and he seems to want the thing to work out, despite its development record and a bit of throat-clearing from some ground-pounding Marines.

Despite the Corps’ apparent confidence in their new bird, skeptics in the media and at think-tanks continue to predict disaster – foremost among them, Lee Gaillard from the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., who last week weighed in with an email distributed to the media: “With lives at stake, the question bears repeating: how combat-ready and maintainable is the MV-22B Osprey?”

The heart of Gaillard’s criticism is, of course, that the V-22 is a fundamentally flawed design and will crash at a high rate due to the “vortex ring state” phenomenon that was a factor in the crashes during testing. VRS is, essentially, a chopper’s tendency to stall during certain descent profiles. But the Marines have proved in thousands of flight hours since 2000 that VRS can be avoided with proper training and tactics, as we reported at Ares in January.

A key component in Mr Gaillard’s criticisms seems to be the fact that the plane has no armament for assault fire, which will require Cobras to escort and prep the LZ, as well as conduct overwatch while you’re deplaning. And then you need a computer to get the thing down in rotor mode and…

MV-22Bs are restricted from taking radical evasive maneuvers. Planned three-barrel nose turrets for clearing hostile landing zones have been replaced by ramp-mounted guns that fire to the rear and impede troop egress. Despite the technical review warning of component and flight control computer obsolescence issues conducted by US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) in 2003, all V-22s were grounded last month because of faulty Texas Instruments chips in their computerized flight control systems.

Unsurprisingly Colonel Glenn Walters, one of the Corps’ most experienced V-22 pilots is confident, discussing the “distributed operations capability of the unit.

“Aviation is the key enabler for distributed operations,” Walter says. He asks us to imagine ground ops at a distance of around 150 miles from their supply base. The Osprey can make multiple runs between the troops and their base on a single load of fuel at around 20 minutes per leg. An H-46 would require more than an hour. “Is that valuable?” he asks about the V-22’s superior speed. “Yes.”

OK. They built the thing because they needed to replace some old air units. And now they’re going to use it.

The British faced a somewhat similar challenge with “distributed operations” and came up with a slightly different solution, which we’ll look at separately.