Podcast: V-22 Back Under The Spotlight

Robert Wall: Welcome back to Check 6, where today we were going to talk about the V-22 and some of its safety issues. We're still going to do that. But with AFA on the horizon, we thought it was important as well to check in on the Air Force and the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter and what's going on there, as well as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs that are likely to feature heavily at AFA. To help unpack what is going on, I'm joined by Brian Everstine, Aviation Week's Senior Pentagon Editor, and Steve Trimble, our Senior Defense Editor. I'm Robert Wall, Executive Editor for Defense and Space. Brian, catch us up a bit on what happened on NGAD. It's been kind of slowly dying, and it just seems to be dying faster.

Brian Everstine: Yeah, so it's kind of been the story of the summer. I guess to go back toward the beginning, all the way back in June, I sat down with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who told me that the NGAD program is kind of in question as they're putting together their Fiscal 2026 budget requests, which is going to be real tight with Sentinel funding, all these other pressures coming together. More broadly, they're taking this opportunity to relook at how they're going to do the Air Dominance mission. Instead of just a straight F-22 replacement and adding in CCAs, they're relooking at these requirements that have been a decade or so in the making. So this has been kind of playing out, and we all jump on every single public statement we can get.

The latest was last week. The Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Jim Slife, was asked about it. Basically, he reiterated that they're going to go back to the very early requirements, do a relook, looking at what technology they have now through CCA development to see if the penetrating counter-air concept is really where they need to go and if they're going to commit to a program of this much money, $300 million a pop, if that's the right way to go. So we're just starting back in the beginning. The language I used in one of my stories was they're just doing a speed run back through these requirements to make sure that that's the right way to go.

Robert Wall: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Steve, you've been through a few of these twists and turns with what we now call NGAD, and it has had some other names. What do you make of it all?

Steve Trimble: I think we have to take them at their word now. I think at the beginning there was a lot of questions. Is this just a ploy to get Congress to bail them out with some funding issues? But they've been consistent with this enough now that I think that we have to take them at their word that they are seriously reconsidering what they want to do.

The question is, the fundamental question is, is there a role for a stand-in crewed fighter from the Air Combat Command package of capabilities in the future conflict with a near pure adversary? It does appear that either way there's going to be an uncrewed role through the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. But then if there isn't going to be one, if that's what they decide, and they haven't decided yet, but if they decide that there isn't a role for this stand-in crewed fighter, and by stand-in, we're talking about a fighter that can exist and persist inside contested airspace, defended airspace, even highly contested airspace, if that's the case, then your crewed tactical aircraft component will be limited to a stand-off role only, and they will be there to support your stand-in presence by uncrewed tactical aircraft like the CCAs and the B-21, which is supposed to be stand-in as well. So they have to decide what they want to do.

The implication is if they decide that there isn't a role for this stand-in presence of a smaller tactical-type aircraft with a pilot in it, then they need to invest in stand-off capabilities of the existing fleet, the F-35s, the F-22s, the F-15EXs in particular, as well as the aircraft that support those and enable those, airborne and early warning control aircraft especially, and tankers, and perhaps even this new family of Next Generation Air Refueling Systems, or NGAS as they call it. That had been sort of on the back-burner funding-wise, but that could be moved forward. It's interesting that all this is happening with a mobility officer now as Chief of Staff of the Air Force with General Allvin. That's how I'm looking at it right now.

Robert Wall: What you're basically saying is B-21 isn't operational yet. CCAs, to some extent, the ones we're going to start seeing here at AFA, haven't flown yet, and they've claimed their first combat kill, NGAD.

Steve Trimble: They haven't claimed it yet. They haven't claimed it yet. The decision really hasn't been made. If I read their body language of General Slife and General Allvin and Frank Kendall, it all seems that they're leaning away from this now. Where we spent a decade, going back to 2012, writing about this march to develop and award of contract for a crewed next generation fighter, the NGAD platform at the heart of this NGAD family of systems, they seem to be leaning away from it now. That is really a historic decision or a historic shift for tactical aviation, for air power as we think about it conventionally. We just have to see how this goes.

Brian Everstine: Just to reiterate some of the things Steve said, that it really seems that NGAS really has risen in prominence in Air Force planning. We go back to Secretary Kendall spoke in July to an industry conference in Ohio that I was at saying he's looking at using potentially the new Quick Start acquisition authority to get a head start on NGAS ahead of any congressional approval. About a few weeks ago, I did an exit interview with General Mike Minihan, who's now stepped down and retired as AMC commander, and he said an interesting note was that something happened within the past six or seven months or so that really changed the threat understanding to extend the push toward NGAS. He wouldn't really expand the specifics on that. But there is some changing, something in the works that is really pushing NGAS forward.

Robert Wall: Brian, I'm kind of curious, you're going to AFA, but you also just came back from Tailhook. What was the mood music on the Navy's side about their version of NGAD, the F/A-XX?

Brian Everstine: A couple weeks ago I was at Tailhook. This is my third year in a row. It's a really, really fascinating discussion. This year, unfortunately, they decided to make it off the record. It's a really insular reunion-type event with a symposium. 

But more broadly, there's a really, I don't know if I want to say, disconnect, but within the Navy's aviation community, they're really trying to push forward, stay on pace going forward with F/A-XX, going forward with the T-45 replacement, going forward even with future Vertical Lift (Maritime Strike) as this is a top priority. It needs to be part of the CVW in the future in the 2035 time frame.

But back here in Washington, where's the money? How can the Navy afford this? They have such a high serious shipbuilding bill coming due. You have to keep the submarines going. We saw this play out in last year's budget request where the Navy took a substantial cut on its F/A-XX. Then the Hill, I think it was the Senate, took that even just down to $50 million for the next year. But within the Navy, they're still expecting an F/A-XX contract award in the next year time frame probably jumping ahead of the Air Force's NGAD plans. So I'm trying to figure out how these two worlds will combine where the Navy can move at pace where what they need to on these programs without any money coming behind it.

Robert Wall: Right, yeah, very interesting.

Steve Trimble: There is an answer to that, and that is the appropriations process, of course. The House did not fund or did not insert the money that the Navy excluded for F/A-XX in the Fiscal 2025 budget in their version of it, which hasn't passed yet, but the Senate did. The Senate restored most of the funding that the Navy cut from the F/A-XX program. So assuming they actually do pass an appropriations bill, they'll have to meet in conference and hammer out those differences, and Congress could basically bail the Navy out this year. But of course, that funding cut that the Navy announced last year for F/A-XX isn't just for next year. It's through the entire fight up. So either Navy's going to have to figure out where to get the money to put that money back in the next '26 POM, or this is going to have to happen every year where Congress bails out the Navy, which is under these funding constraints. So we'll see how that works out.

Robert Wall: Brian, as you were dealing with Tailhook, obviously you also got your hands on some very interesting documents about the V-22 crash. Why don't you tell our listeners a bit about what you got, what you learned out of those documents?

Brian Everstine: Just a little bit of background here. The Air Force, I think it was late July, released its formal... a public investigation into the November 2023 crash of GUNDAM 22, AFSOC CV-22 that crashed outside of Japan on a training mission that ended up sadly killing eight airmen. The public investigation pinned it on a couple factors. The main causal factor was a component that broke for the first time in this manner in the V-22's gearbox, which led to a cascading series of failures within the gearbox that played out over an extended flight. The investigation, the AFSOC leadership really pointed to some decision-making by the crews to not divert over a series of chip burn advisories and eventually, unfortunately, crashed while in a holding pattern outside of Yakushima Island. So that was the formal public lay down of this.

I and a couple other outlets received some internal documents known as a Safety Investigation Board, which is not meant to be public, that drills down into more specific factors. One thing that really stood out, there's a lot there, going to manufacturing defects, going into how these components have broken in ways in the past that NAVAIR and the Air Force were aware of. But one thing that really stood out to me, and it kind of goes with the trend of what I've been hearing from Air Force officials over the past couple of years, is just an increasing disconnect or frustration between the operators of the Osprey and the airworthiness authority at NAVAIR.

One of the formal recommendations was that the Air Force actually take on the airworthiness decision of the V-22 for, or sorry, the CV-22, their own fleet. Take that away from NAVAIR because of this growing disconnect and have it follow Air Force directives, have it follow Air Force policy instead of leaving in the hands of NAVAIR. This is something that we've seen growing over the past couple of years. Back in 2022 when AFSOC went ahead and first grounded theirs following a hard landing in Norway, that was kind of forcing NAVAIR's hand to do a broader stand-down and start working to get more information on what was then the hard clutch engagement problem. So this is a continuing trend of disconnect. Then we'll see if this recommendation is adopted. This is still just an internal suggestion out of this Safety Investigation Board.

Robert Wall: Steve, I was struck by something Brian here said. You're alluding to, not also the prior crash... It does seem like the Osprey has not only a long history of crashes for sometimes odd-seeming reasons. They also seem to be really struggling, repeatedly dealing with these things, and somehow systemically, there still seem to be problems. Maybe I'm just looking over too big a time span, but as long as I've known this program, and it's unfortunately quite a long time now, these things keep coming up. What do you make of what we learned this time around?

Steve Trimble: The real treasure of the documents that Brian got his hands on is it really gives you this really intense, internal look inside this very tragic and catastrophic crash that killed eight airmen off of Japan. We see this a lot in NTSB reports of commercial aviation, where you can really get into all the contributing factors that's so seldom available in military crashes because they just release a snapshot of the Safety Investigation Board findings rather than the entire thing.

As you read the entire documents, the annexes, and all the contributing factors, what you see in this case, as you see in the commercial aviation crashes, yes, there's a couple of big issues that came up, but then there's this sort of conspiracy of all these other contributing factors that have to align themselves perfectly in this one chain of unbroken events that leads to this tragic result.

In this case, it starts with the fact that the raw material supplier for the pinion gear that ultimately shattered and failed in this case used a process that creates a higher incidence of this non-metallic inclusions, as they call it. So instead of providing a perfectly pure form of metal as raw material for the pinion gear, it's got these little shards of non-metallic pieces in it that over time are more likely to fail, and as we saw, this took place. But other suppliers that supply the same type of material use a totally different process where the rate of that incidence of this non-metallic inclusion is much less. But for some reason, NAVAIR and Bell did not require all the suppliers to abide by this more rigorous process and more successful process, so it got through there.

Even though they're aware of this higher rate of incidence, the engineers, as they're developing the manuals and the technical orders, don't spell out the risks clearly enough so that the crews are aware that, if they ever get something like a chip alert, as was the case in this, there's a real high risk here that they're taking if they choose to ignore it, which they're allowed to do in certain cases, because of this issue with the inclusion of this non-metallic stuff and the raw material of the metal that made this gear. So that's the second piece of it.

Then it talks about this human/machine interface breakdown, where the crew, once they get these alerts that there's this chip that's being detected in the system, which means that something is falling off something that should be attached to a gear or something like that, there's a chip of it that's escaped, that's either an indication that just one chip that's hit the sensor and keeps hitting the sensor or that there's several of these, and there's this cascading effect that points to a real issue, which means you need to land really fast.

Because they're not sure which one it is, and they were part of this exercise and they were the CASEVAC aircraft in the exercise so it's an important role, they didn't want to leave that behind, they decided to stay on station even though the technical orders are saying, "You probably should land as soon as possible." It's advisory. It's not telling them they have to, but it's saying, "It would've been a good idea if you did this." They choose to ignore that, stay in it, and meanwhile look for secondary conditions. They're looking for other things, not just this chip, the presence of this chip in the oil stream, but other indications that there are failures in the gearbox.

In fact, there were secondary conditions that were being detected by sensors in components adjacent to the gearbox that was telling the system that there's a step change in broadband frequency, in vibration, that it's 10 times higher than it should be, but in the human/machine interface design, that's not enough to tell the crew that that's going on.

There is a different sensor output that is the tripwire for a warning to the crew that's measuring something differently. Just in this bizarre one-off incident, it's not manifesting itself in a way that this particular parameter is getting measured, so the crew isn't getting the warning. Even if they had gotten the warning, what the Safety Investigation Board found was that the warning was being delivered to the crew, if they go into their flight instrumentation or their flight information system and scroll down to the flight maintenance summary page, at the bottom of that, it would be telling them that there's this vibration issue. There wouldn't be a blinking red light or an oral warning that there's this secondary condition present, which was what they were looking for. So they didn't get that. So there's this failure of human/machine interface design.

Then there's this crew resource management breakdown, because the mishap pilot in this case is considered to be a very good pilot. He's highly respected by all the other members of the squadron. He's the squadron's only Fighter Weapons school graduate, which is the crème de la crème of military pilots, so everybody's looking up to this guy. As these chip warnings are coming in, they're looking to him to see what he thinks. He says, "This happened to me on another flight. It turned out we landed with a precautionary landing, and it turned out it was absolutely nothing. It was the same chip that just kept hitting the sensor and was supposed to get burned off, but that part didn't work, so it just kept tripping it, and it was nothing. We can just ignore this." Whereas in crew resource management training, the other crew members are supposed to speak up at that point and say, "Well, are you sure? Should we take a more cautious approach to this?" That part failed because of this sort of halo effect around this mishap pilot, according to the Safety Investigation Board.

Then finally they make the decision to accept that they have an in-flight emergency and divert to the nearest airfield. They don't realize there's actually two airfields even closer to them than the one that they actually chose. So they go to the third farthest airfield, which is taking even more time as this pinion gear on their left-hand prop rotor gearbox is starting to disintegrate. As they get into the airspace to this tower-controlled airport, there's a miscommunication with the Japanese tower controller. They have an in-flight emergency, but the tower controller isn't aware of it. He clears two aircraft to depart from that airport ahead of this V-22 that's coming in.

At that point, the V-22 has the right to declare an in-flight emergency and land ahead of those two aircraft that have been cleared for departure. The pilot thinks it's not that big of a deal and stays in the pattern and allows those aircraft to depart. That's where he's 900 feet off the runway over the ocean, that's when the pinion gear finally gives out, shatters in five pieces and causes the aircraft to snap roll to the left in a way that's unrecoverable to the crew.

When you think about that, all those systemic failures, from the raw material supplier to the tech manual authors or tech order and manual authors to the human/machine interface design, the crew resource management, all of that, they still could have landed. They could have averted this tragic result if not for this last fateful decision, potentially. That's the tragedy of these things. That's not to absolve any step in that process. They're all failures, and they all have to be dealt with.

But that is what you see, especially as you go into even more complex designs, and tilt rotors are among the most complex. Keep in mind, this is not just a tilt rotor. This is a whole tilt engine. The V-280, the second generation that the Army just selected for future long-range assault aircraft, that's just a tilt rotor. So this is tilting the whole engine. That's been the source of the issues that we've seen with the V-22 all the way back to the beginning. They've had other issues, too. But just that extra bit of complexity and all the things you have to do to account for that has been a problem for the V-22 the whole way. There's frustration, we can tell, from Air Force Special Operations Command, as Brian was just reporting and talking about, about how NAVAIR has been managing the risks. So that's being adjudicated as well.

Robert Wall: Well, let me just ask actually on that a bit, because this is not early lifecycle of this program. We're still discovering problems that you would think by now a program that's been around this long we would've been through and addressed. Clearly things can happen. Manufacturing processes change. But I do find it fairly stunning we keep getting back to this point. I guess my question, to some extent, and I'll start perhaps, Brian, with you, what's your sense when talking, for example, with the Air Force? The Marines clearly are wedded to the V-22 in a way that goes back to the early days of the program, and it's probably never going to change. But how about the Air Force? Is AFSOC ready to walk away at some point, do you think?

Brian Everstine: I don't know if I'd say ready to walk away, but my outside reading the tea leaves is the commitment is really not there to the level of the Marines, obviously. Even the Navy, as they're standing up CMV-22B, the Air Force has I think it was 14 that are just in storage right now from an already small fleet. They're really pushing ahead and focusing on what DARPA is doing with its SPRINT program. They're just really trying to look at the next generation. They're not going to say this directly probably in testimony or anything. They still want to say that this is a game-changing priority. They want to have it. It's not deployed. They still can't fly away 30 minutes from a divert location based on the findings of this investigation.

But it seems like the Air Force is really trying to push to the next generation. You hear the previous two AFSOC commanders basically saying the assumptions from the Iran hostage rescue crisis in the '80s that led to the V-22 is in the past. They need to look at the next generation of Air Force Special Operations, and that's SPRINT. That's what they're trying to do with A2E, and an Osprey doesn't really have as much of a place in it. That's just my perspective from talking to some of these officials.

Robert Wall: Steve, let me ask you, you alluded to the Army program. Is the Army program a way also maybe for the Marines to retain the love affair of the mission profile of the tiltrotor but maybe with a different engineering instantiation?

Steve Trimble: It is no secret that the Marines were rooting for the V-280 design. They made it pretty clear a few years ago when they basically said, "We don't care which aircraft the Army picks as long as it's the V-280." They didn't say it that way. They said as long as it goes 280 knots, which is the V-280 and not the competitor. So they want it, but they don't have the money for it.

They had a program, the Attack Utility Replacement Aircraft. They want to replace their UH-1s and AH-1s. The presumption was that they were going to pick the FLRAA. They have a competition, of course, but that really was the plan. But they don't have the money. They booted that program several years into the future and concentrate on some other things in the meantime. Their AH-1s and UH-1s are still fairly young. They've all been procured in the last 20, 25 years, so they still have some time left. But at the same time, the Marines do want to get moving probably in the next decade on that replacement.

I will say also just with the V-22, with the Navy and Marine Corps, they are investing substantially, billions of dollars, in addressing some of these issues that we've talked about. That human/machine interface, there is an upgrade. It's called ODSHHI, I think. I forget what the acronym means. That is directly addressing that issue about the human/machine interface shortfalls with the crew alerting and the warnings. They are going after reliability issues with the nacelle. Of course, as that aircraft ages, those reliability issues become more of a factor. Because of the extreme nature of how that aircraft has to perform, reliability issues have a whole different level of impact and significance on how the aircraft behaves and how safe it is. They are trying to address it, and they are spending money to address those issues. But as the aircraft ages, things happen and more surprises will probably come out with that aircraft. I'm not saying that they haven't anticipated everything, but maybe they have. But that is the challenge with an aircraft like that, that's getting a lot older.

Robert Wall: Well, it's pretty tragic. It makes for pretty tragic reading on so many fronts. Let's leave it there. I’d like to say, hope it's the last time we have to address the V-22 safety issues on one of our Check 6 podcasts. I'm just not convinced it is. Thanks, Brian, thanks, Steve, for both the insights on the V-22 and also obviously NGAD. To our listeners, I recommend you check out the coming cover of Aviation Week. It has a stunning new photo you will not have seen anywhere else of a CCA, and I'll let you discover that for yourself. Thanks again to all of you for listening. Thanks to Guy Ferneyhough here in the UK, our podcast producer, for putting this together. I hope you check us out again on a future Check 6.

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