V-22 aims toward full-rate production.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: Tiltrotor aircraft

The troubled V-22 tiltrotor Osprey aircraft continues to encounter problems even as it lurches toward full-rate production, possibly as early as November of this year.

The V-22 is intended to replace the U.S. Marine Corps' 40-year-old. medium-lift CH-46E Sea Knight and the Air Force Special Operations Command's 34-year-old, heavy lift MH-53 Pave Low III helicopters.

Developed jointly by the Boeing Co. and the Bell Helicopter unit of Textron Inc., the Osprey is a tiltrotor aircraft that is designed to take off and land straight up, like a helicopter, then tilt its rotors forward and fly like a fixed-wing platform.

After four deadly crashes in 2000. flights were suspended for 18 months--a tactic called an "operational pause"--while Bell Boeing engineers corrected flaws in the V-22's hydraulic and flight-control software systems.

Since flights resumed in May 2002, the V-22 has completed a number of successful tests. In November 2004, it passed a 10-day shipboard suitability evaluation. This event, which took place aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1), required interaction between a V-22 parked on the ship's flight deck and one hovering in front of it. Also included were nighttime takeoffs and tests of the flight-control software.

The Wasp test was the fourth and final shipboard evaluation since the V-22's return to flight. The next step was the aircraft's first operational evaluation, which was supposed to begin in February. "It's a four-month final exam," said Air Force Col. Craig S. Olson, manager of the Naval Air Systems Command's V-22 joint program office at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md.

"The V-22 actually performs better in a desert environment than current helicopters," said Marine Col. Keith "Berzerk" Birkholz, head of the Corps' aviation weapons systems requirements branch.

If the Osprey passes the operational evaluation, the program office hopes to receive permission for full-rate production in November of this year, officials said at a recent Navy-industry conference, in Washington, D.C.

That schedule, however, could be affected by another operational pause that was imposed briefly in mid-January; Members of Marine Tiltrotor Test and Evaluation Squadron (VMX) 22, at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C.--where the aircraft is being put through its paces--discovered that bearings in the gearbox that sends power to the aircraft's rotors were wearing out faster than expected. Officials apparently resolved this latest problem within a...