[WARZONE] Even before the entire fleet of V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft was grounded following a fatal crash of an Air Force Osprey off the coast of Japan in November, the Navy’s version was experiencing serious issues that limited its ability to fully perform its assigned missions. Those findings by the Pentagon’s top testing office come even though the Navy's former air boss called the CMV-22B a "game changer" after its first operational deployment in 2022. The Osprey grounding has also forced the Navy to resort to using its dwindling fleet of C-2A Greyhounds to perform essential Carrier Onboard Delivery (COD) duties.
Problems with the ice protection system are a significant concern for the CMV-22B, but there have been several potential drawbacks with having the aircraft take over the COD role since the program's inception. Those issues include a lack of cabin pressurization. Unless its passengers and crew are on oxygen, the Osprey has to fly at lower altitudes, through poorer weather, and over long distances, at turboprop-like speeds. Being that its destination can be far out to sea with no nearby divert field, that can include being forced to fly through highly inclement weather. There are other key advantages to having the CMV-22B on the COD mission, which we will discuss in a moment.
The 44% of mission failures due to problems with the ice protection system appears to be a significant increase from what was previously known.
As we noted in the past, in February 2023, as the Navy announced the CMV-22B had obtained its Initial Operating Capability (IOC), Bloomberg News reported that the aircraft wasn’t yet "operationally suitable." That was because it had only "partially met reliability requirements," the Pentagon’s testing office said in a non-public assessment. Among the problems was that the CMV-22's ice protection system "accounted for 25% of the operational mission failures, which will result in mission aborts."
"The CMV-22B was not operationally suitable due to failures of many subsystems, with the ice protection system accounting for 44% of the total operational mission failures," the Pentagon's Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, or DOT&E, stated in its Fiscal Year 2023 annual report released last week.