A Story About a Certain Aviation Technology in Two Parts
At last we come to the almost end… too much aerodynamics to put this all in one post.
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
―Thomas Sowell in “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”
In AMST-2, I threw out a mention of
…the July 7, 1992, crash of a V-22 Osprey into the Potomac during a demo for congressional staffers. It gets a lot of talk because it is supposed to be the replacement aircraft for the Marine Corps’ aged CH-46 transport helicopter. I have paid enough attention to both AV-8B Harrier crashes and the V-22 to heed Jeff’s wisdom: Never select for a brand new airframe or you’ll be the one working out the bugs, whether you want to be or not.
This is known as a “teaser” in show biz or “foreshadowing” in the writing biz.
While I was dealing with my own aircraft’s issues from 1993-1996 (as detailed previously), the V-22 tiltrotor was going through fits and starts with its Operational Testing and Evaluation (OTE), all while being hyped by the military-industrial complex (MIC) as the greatest thing since sliced bread. By the time I was getting settled into the Fleet, New River Air Station, and HML/A-269, the Marine Corps was accepting delivery of Ospreys to turn the former CH-46 training squadron – HMMT-204 – into VMMT-204, the Osprey training squadron. But I have to back into this story, so…
Time for a little aviation history.
The tiltrotor concept is older than I am. The whole concept of vertical takeoff and landing by fixed wing – including tiltrotor technology – has been around since at least the 1960s. To me it has that same hokey look as all of those 1950’s and ‘60’s Jetsons-like concept cars and homes of the future in art and infrastructure; the entire idea of “progressive” liberal Utopia was built upon this from the post-WWII era. Cartoons when I was a kid had those voice-over, mock-u-toons, parodying the government and think-tank “Society of the Future!” overly enthusiastic promos of what the 21st century would look like.1
The XV-15 or V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, or whatever you want to call it, looks exactly like one of those ideas that someone managed to convince a group of influential people would work (stomp, stomp). And then somehow, through sheer force of will, convinced the military to buy off on. I have been watching the V-22 be forced down the throat of the Marine Corps the entirety of my career, with all of the resulting deaths perfectly predictable to even the most naive of aviation enthusiasts – like me.
This link is to a 2000 NASA “retrospective” puff piece where everybody pats themeslves on the back for the 40-year “miracle” of tiltrotor aviation. The whole thing can best be summarized by “Figure 34 – Illustration from 1974 Tilt Rotor Research Aircraft Project Plan.”
You see – the military is going to do cool stuff ™(!) with a the V-22 Osprey – and after a bunch of troops die trying to figure out if this can even work, it will revolutionize business and commuter traffic (!!) – by moving us from large regional airports to smaller regional hubs because these things can take off and land like helicopters (!!!) – Utopia Profits will follow (!!!!).
The problem is that “doing cool stuff” is not how military aircraft are sourced. Aircraft designs are dictated by the demands of warfare, and its concomitant doctrine, both of which constantly change. These choices are themselves constrained by prior history (i.e. previous choices) and the current reality of force mix, technology, and doctrine. If this all sounds a bit esoteric, consider that this picture in no way explains how this platform – the XV-15/V-22 was going to integrate with respect to then-existing military mission requirements, including tactics, doctrine, and technology built to support such missions.
I got an anecdote to ‘splain what I mean.
I ran face first into this while in the training squadron in 1993. At the time, I was in the middle of the AH-1W syllabus and just chock full o’ the most recent SuperCobra tactics and doctrine when the Deputy Chief of Staff for Marine Corps Aviation (DCS-Air was the old moniker, I think) came to speak to all of us at MAG-39 aboard Camp Pendleton. The V-22 was on its way to the Fleet and it would, we were assured, complete its OT&E in the coming years and replace the aging CH-46E. LtGen Harry Blot was a 3-star and was a huge proponent, and driving force, for the V-22.2 The Marine Corps definitely needed a replacement for its Vietnam-era reliable old workhorse, the CH-46E; it had been refurbished and beefed up more than once, but it was well past its service life. General Blot spoke at length about how the Osprey was going to be the future of Marine Aviation with its Over the Horizon capability because of its ~300 kts cruise airspeed (among other capabilities).
Huh, thought I to myself. But… Cobras only go 170 kts with external stores, so how the hell are we going to escort these guys? Detached? Will we be on different ships? Rendez-vous en route? No helicopter in the world goes more than 200 knots, so is this guy proposing that this technology eventually eliminates/obviates all other military helicopters? Will Harriers escort it?
Somehow, when he asked for questions at the end, in front of nearly the entirety of my professional community, I formulated something that roughly encapsulated those thoughts italicized above… and the General heckled me. He called me a noob and then said it was time for us to all go to the club; he never addressed my dumb “lieutenant” question.3 I was standing around taking the ribbing from my peers when a couple of senior pilots in the west coast gun squadrons came up and made a point of loudly saying that it was a legitimate question that deserved a serious answer. I felt marginally less embarrassed, but c’est la vie.
Whatever. Not gonna be my problem, I figured.
Some finer points about helicopter flight regimes.
This won’t be on the test, but it should. In a previous essay in this series, I put up a picture of the height-velocity diagram for the Bell 206. Below is the Deadman’s Curve for the UH-60 – the Blackhawk helicopter of “Blackhawk Down” infamy. The light hatched area is where you can operate and, should you lose power, you can still safely autorotate to the ground. Notice how “tight” the space is under the dark shaded area – i.e. how close to the ground you have to stay until you get to 40 or 50 kts of airspeed.
What’s not shown is all of the other factors that impact whether you can take off or land in such a profile, the biggest one of which is the lack of a runway. Said another way, helicopters are designed and used specifically because of their ability to take off and land in these profiles without a runway: medevac flights land on roofs of hospitals, or in parking lots, or alongside the highway to pick up accident victims. Helicopters drop skiers off on the side of mountains, fast-rope troops over the top of buildings, and land to the deck of oil platforms, or on a ship, day or night. The Coast Guard uses helicopters for Search and Rescue (SAR) at sea: one of the exact things – the “cool stuff” – shown in the 1974 “picture plan” for the Osprey.
See, the point of that picture is to create the impression that those missions are “no big deal” and an Osprey can simply be “swapped in” and perform just like a helicopter when it’s in helicopter mode – but it doesn’t work that way. The Osprey can’t do what a helicopter does. It may be able to tilt its wings upward and land vertically at the end of a “plane” flight, but the Osprey is absolutely not meant to be flown in helicopter mode all of the time. First off, when it does so, it loses its chief benefit: forward flight of 250-300 kts. Second, and more importantly, when it does operate in “helicopter” mode and flight regimes, you now have a helicopter with a set of rotor blades that each sit off the centerline of the aircraft, and where the lift from each rotor disc is 90º from the forward direction of the aircraft – i.e. the way the pilot is facing and looking.
Look back up at the Osprey picture above, specifically the image where it shows a person on a rope hanging below the aircraft. Do you see how any difference in lift between the two rotor discs would necessarily cause the aircraft to roll? Compare it to an actual picture of the aircraft it replaced, below, where it is doing the same thing.
I’ve seen supply ships steam alongside, on both sides of a big deck, and then watched 46s slide back and forth between ships like fruit flies over sliced peaches. It’s amazing how agile and how quickly they can move laterally, even with loads on sling, but that is aerodynamically possible because their two rotors sit along the centerline of the aircraft. They have no inclination to make the aircraft roll if one or the other rotor have differing amounts of lift, even in the anarchic wind conditions that exist between three moving ships doing 20 kts forward speed with winds across the ship’s superstructures to complicate matters.
Now if all of this just sounds like sour grapes from a guy who hasn’t flown in almost 20 years, please read this article about the Osprey, written just a few months ago – in 2024, after 30 years of “shaking out” the bugs in the Osprey. Here’s the money-quote about this “super-technology”:
The services are barred from flying the controversial tiltrotor aircraft more than 30 minutes away from a suitable airfield to divert to in case anything goes wrong. That has caused some of the services, such as the Navy, to continue relying on other aircraft to accomplish tasks that the Osprey would have taken on.
Bwahahahahahahaaa!!!!! You don’t say, huh?
The truth is that these things suck at helicopter flight regimes because they’re really planes and (therefore) optimized for forward flight. Hovering and flying vertically at relatively slow speeds in choppy or uncertain winds, with not much room to land if things go wrong, requires a certain kind of aerodynamic stability and, perhaps more than anything, visibility – the more the better, in every direction. Again – look at the picture of the CH-46 with its twin rotors and now imagine that the pilot is sitting where the door-gunner is, and add a nose there and a tail at the other end – now you’ve got an Osprey. That aircraft has rotated the entire centerline 90º, but in so doing have lost the ability to “flare” – one of the most critical maneuvers in helicopter aviation.
As you near the ground in an autorotation, somewhere between say 75’ to 200’ (AFL) you have to drop your tail, which allows air to come flowing up through the rotor disc and builds “turns” – i.e. increases the rotorhead speed – which becomes lift as you level the helicopter and then translate those “turns” into lift by pulling up on the collective, increasing the pitch on the blades and allowing the aircraft to cushion the last feet to touchdown.
It is impossible to overstate how important visibility is to the kinds of flight regimes genuine rotary-wing aircraft – i.e helicopters, operate in. It is a big part of why Harriers are also exceedingly dangerous when operating near the ground. The margins are narrow and they don’t have either the experience or the visibility for operating close to the ground vertically. Hovering an aircraft demands that you see and react to any drift in any direction instantly because there are a number of opposing forces at play and the further away from equilibrium you get, the bigger the control inputs hovering requires.
So why the hell do any of these problems with the Osprey matter to a guy who flew Cobras and then left to become a lawyer? See that quote up top from my best buddy Jeff telling me not to select for a brand-new aircraft lest you be the one working out the bugs? Well, my college comrade, sometime defense partner while playing ice hockey, and big brother Jeff ‘Stinky’ Prowse was one of the first four CH-46 pilots selected to be the guinea pigs qualify and then become instructors in the new Osprey training squadron at New River.
Next one is the final one in this series.
- Tex Avery made a series of cartoons between 1949-1951 called “House of Tomorrow”, “Car of Tomorrow,” and “Farm of Tomorrow” that are absolute classics of satire mocking those promo videos of the day. ↩︎
- There was a big argument about how the power control on the new aircraft would be designed and named. Would it be more “helo” or stiff-wing”? In helicopters, you pull up on the collective to increase pitch – and thus lift – on the blades. In fixed-wing, however, like your car, you have a throttle that you push forward to the firewall and it dumps more fuel in the engine and therefore, you get more power. The V-22 compromised on the name for its power lever by calling it the “Blottle” – after General Blot. ↩︎
- I note here that despite this, I actually like General Blot personally and don’t give the incident that much credence – he didn’t have an answer and it was as good a time as any to call for happy hour on a Friday in southern California. Ironically, I later served in the same squadron with his son, Harry Blot, Jr. (“Blotto”), one of the Harrier pilots on my deployment with HMM-263 aboard the USS Kearsarge. Blotto was a former Air Force enlisted man, a crew chief on C-130s, and he lived right around the corner from me aboard the boat. I liked Harry a lot and his Old Man actually came aboard to see his son off. I happened to catch part of a moment b/w the two generations of Marine aviators and it was moving. ↩︎
I wonder if General Three-star had a comfy sinecure waiting for him at Bell or Boeing.
I don’t know. I could probably look it up, but I’m kinda afraid to.
Do Ospreys have any differential thrust going on, as in by design? Things are nuts..
Great articles Ozy, thanks!
Yes – as I note above, when they switch to helo mode from forward flight, they are an absolute abomination. It’s a helicopter but where the guy driving is sitting 90* to the long axis of the “rotors”. This has …. consequences.
Thanks Ozzy. I’m looking forward to the conclusion, but I’m not expecting a happy ending.
He met The Bro, at least online. What could be a happier ending than that?
You see when two people love each other very much…
As my drill instructor would have said, “Happy endings? We ain’t in *that* business, Candidate.”
From dim memories, I thought the only purpose of vertical-lift, fixed-wing aircraft was to arrive and depart from airfields with the necessary runway.
They were never supposed to be a replacement for rotary-wing aircraft.
But, logic and reasoning never got in the way of fucking up a good idea by using it in the wrong way.
And, as I recall, the implementation was a complete fuck up as well.
Stay tuned for next week’s final episode!
The autogyro is proven technology with similar capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQMImcbbI_Y
Not sure why that idea was not developed further. They’ve been around since the 1920s and predate helicopters by about 20 years.
OK, they can’t hover, but that is only relevant for search and rescue. And fast-roping too I suppose.
My favorite disgruntled Vietnam vet’s take:
http://johntreed.net/helicopter.html
tl;dr – choppers fly relatively low and slow, have little armor, are loud, and land in predictable places
bottom line: the military value is severely limited
You just need to add a flamethrower and some guided missiles and they’ll do fine.
https://youtu.be/xFozWDLne7c?si=CC7XT8LsV52g2ge6
Well that’s the most dangerous thing I’ve seen today. I strongly approve.
“I’d like to send this letter to the Prussian Consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 auto-gyro?”
OT… I can’t get enough of the what seems to me entirely manufactured drama between NYC mayor Adams and governor Hochul.
I have no idea if he is guilty or what he is supposedly guilty of but the optics here are just bananas. I can’t remember the last time, if ever, a governor has kissed the ring of that disgusting piece of shit Sharpton. Sure, he is a mandatory stop on the Democrat mayor circuit but for her to bow and scrape to far-left racist royalty seems singularly dumb in current year.
This series is fantastic, Ozy. Thanks again.
Thanks for patronizing, Evan.
And sorry for my late replies – it’s been a busy day of work and travel. In Phoenix at the moment.
Ah, cool – some local US/CAN sled hockey action:
https://whdh.com/news/saugus-sled-hockey-series-gives-people-of-all-abilities-a-chance-to-get-in-the-game/
Sadly, I don’t think I can make either game but I’ll be rooting for the Americans to show those flappy-headed bastids what’s what.
Good series Ozy. You haven’t even gotten to the most fascinating, and scary part, about flying the Osprey.
I have only been on them twice. A trip out from the Baghdad Green Zone to the Syrian border and back a few hours later. I already knew the scary part apart flying that contraption and wasn’t happy about it.
Once we were underway I did like the speed as we zoooooomed at extremely low altitudes. (I had witnessed the enemy end a CH-47 flight back in 2003 and didn’t want to experience that.)
Thanks, DE. You’ll want to read the thrilling, but expectedly craptastic ending!
🙂
Random crazy thing that just happened:
Backstory: A customer is replacing their network equipment at a large number of sites. My company is doing the planning, configuration, change management, testing, basically anything that can be done remotely. There’s another company that is contracted to be onsite during the cutovers to do the physical installation, cable moves, reboots, all that stuff.
Anyways, I was on a cutover call tonight and the guy who was doing the physical installation got pissed off, quit, and left. WTF. I told Mrs. Parnell and she suggested that he was probably one of those goddamn Gen-Z assholes who don’t want to work and get their panties in a bunch when they’re asked to do their job, but on the phone he sounded like a crusty old guy.
I’m willing to bet there’s at least a decade’s worth of anger and frustration at Crusty Old Guy’s bosses and he’d just had enough.
Sometimes Gen-Z ain’t wrong.
https://youtu.be/gj2iGAifSNI
Arise, ’tis Wotan’s Day.
…Of course nobody listens to me.
Nope.
Okay! All right already! I’m up, I’m up! Geez! 🙄
Good morning, U and Sean! 😉
How goes?
(I’m sorry I’m delayed in asking, I was driving to the office at the time)
Well, I emerged from the bedroom to find a hairball in the hall right outside the bathroom…so it has to get better from here, right?
Other than that, OK. It’s a balmy 15 degrees here in SW OH (“feels like 4,”) so a tropical paradise. How are you?
Hawt.
I wrote a long reply, but WordPress decided to expire my session while I was typing and it was all lost.
😣
…and good morning, Ted’S.
It’s okay, I was grousing about how I was solving a mystery author’s short stories by recognizing narrative convention rather than inductive reasoning, and I got her first name wrong to boot (and the detective’s last name)
It was Actually Dorothy sayers, and it was a Peter Wimsey story.
Indeed. If your readers can solve your mysteries that way, you’re doing it wrong.
I suspect it’s because they’re short stories and she had to be frugal with words.
Mornin, brrrrrr….
😨🍳🐫
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYO1-gGWJyo
🎶🎶 all videos are better with 🐒
Oh come on, it’s 14° today, up from 13 ° yesterday… admittedly the wind chille is down to -2° from yesterday’s -1°
Whats with you people and the heat blast of temps in the teens?
Its still like 7 degrees here.
Lie back and think of 7° Celsius.
🥵
Wait, that’s 44.6℉
(The ratio to remember is 9:5 A change of 1℃ is 9/5℉, just add or subtract 32 to adjust the freezing point)
I’ve got mountains shielding me from the Canukistani weather machines.
It is 45 degrees here. Fortunately, we’ll be done with this cold snap soon.
UnCivilServant:
I’ve gotten to where I can usually pick out the criminal in Mr. Ballen narratives early on, based on how he arranges his stories.
Mr. Ballen: https://youtu.be/HA3tzWGu4jM?si=ZRb0h73AmpvL8LwC
Also, you can do the same with Agatha Christie mysteries.
Sherlock Holmes stories—especially the earlier ones—are a little more difficult, because Doyle cheats, and throws in information at the end that solves the case, rather than allowing the reader to see the evidence earlier.
“Hard-boiled detective” stories (Hammett and Chandler, etc.) don’t follow the conventions and rules of the cozies, but sometimes you can figure them out based on general knowledge about how stories worked. I figured out “The Lady in the Lake” early into the story, when I first read it, just because I am aware of tropes.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HardboiledDetective
That is why I never liked Holmes. You can’t asspull clues after the fact, that’s unfair to the reader.
the difference between spotting and connecting the relevant information and going “the story spent too many words on these seemingly innocent interaction, therefore..” makes an important distinction, which is what I was grousing about regarding the Sayers short stories I’ve been listening to. It was a lack of red herrings that made it too obvious.
Good morning!
In late. I fell asleep during the 10 minutes of “petting the dog time.” Obviously I did not sleep well last night.
Morning.
How did Lily take the rejection?
Well, she would not have been shy about nose-poking me if she wanted more.