what's up with the osprey tilt rotor??

[BigGrey]

The Harrier was a great Air Show airplane but the first add I saw in I think in Time over 20 years ago I got a chuckle they showed it landing next to a battle field in a field to rearm and fuel yea right. I worked air shows flight crew with these things and they move air and kick up anything not tied down and then the intake is bigger than the cockpit.

The Harrier has never done what the Marines claimed at the start. So I think the Marines are on the same road with this one too.

The RAF certainly operated their Harriers off airfield in Germany, and both the RAF and RN seemed happy and capable with the thing. The performance in 1982 kept them happy, albeit not so much rough field as shipboard and damaged field V/STOL.

I agree there may be a degree of over claiming of abilities with the Harrier (I'm no expert) but it was far from hopeless.

A dozen years ago or so I watched a military exercise at Camp Pendleton and the Harriers were operating in the field. It looked like most of them were operating off of paved roads but I did see some huge dust clouds around the area. It looked to me like they were practicing rearm/refuel as some of the planes did not stay at the landing sites very long.

Les

[drgondog]

[quote="jtramo"]I'm just a little worried that it isnt really packing much heat for a front line aircraft and if it takes a hit in the driveshaft/tranny its a bad glider. Three if the major crashes involved problems with the gearbox just from bad design or mx let alone battle damage.
[/ quote]

I wasn't at Bell when the preliminary design for the 22 was started but I was on the XV-15 wing design. If similar, and it should be, there are two driveshafts per side to and from engine to transmission 'mixing box' and back out again to the engine/prop drive.

If one driveshaft is hit the other will continue to enable the props on both sides to continue operation. If you lose a prop rotor, kiss your ass goodbye. If you lose one engine and have at least one engine and one shaft in each wing you may continue on..because one engine will drive the mixing box and in turn spool torque back out to each prop.

The other major design issue was alignment and functionality of flaps during 'jump take off' when the wing deflect enormously and the bearing hangers on the flaps are instantly out of alignment with the flap shaft.

The bird required some thinking early in the design.

[JDK]

Nice Airshow pictures, but I won't really be impressed until the Osprey can draw a crowd of Amish Chics.

You should ask them the serial number of the washer on their horse and buggy.

Now that's good right there. Amish reggie spotters.

It's actually called STOVL: Short Take Off, Vertical Landing. At combat weight, it cannot take off vertically. I'm not sure it can take off vertically even at minimum weight. It also can't land vertically when heavy. It can, however, operate off a very short runway at combat weight.

Oh, I'm sure it can land vertically at max weight - it's just that afterwards there may be a bill for replacement of the equipment, or maybe the whole aircraft, or maybe aircraft and crew...

The RAF certainly operated their Harriers off airfield in Germany, and both the RAF and RN seemed happy and capable with the thing. The performance in 1982 kept them happy, albeit not so much rough field as shipboard and damaged field V/STOL.

I agree there may be a degree of over claiming of abilities with the Harrier (I'm no expert) but it was far from hopeless.

A dozen years ago or so I watched a military exercise at Camp Pendleton and the Harriers were operating in the field. It looked like most of them were operating off of paved roads but I did see some huge dust clouds around the area. It looked to me like they were practicing rearm/refuel as some of the planes did not stay at the landing sites very long.

I guess we should just be grateful we never got to find out how the Harrier worked in action in Germany. Obviously the Defender would've been better...

[bdk]

Conway: Marines Must Think of Afghan-Bound Osprey As More Than Helo
Defense Daily 01/27/2009
Author: Emelie Rutherford


The Marine Corps' top officer said he is "very proud" of how the V-22 Osprey has performed in Iraq and wants the service to consider multiple uses of the tilt-rotor aircraft that is likely to be sent to Afghanistan.

Commandant Gen. James Conway told reporters last Friday that for the previously troubled V-22 program "our biggest challenge right now is to stop thinking, as a Marine Corps, about the Osprey as a helicopter."


"It's not just a helicopter," Conway said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. "So we've challenged our people in Iraq: 'Think about new and different uses of an airplane that can be that fast and that effective, and let's go the next horizon here.'"


Conway called the Osprey "the aircraft of our times," noting it can "cruise at two-and-a-half times the speed of our current helicopters, cruises at 13,000 feet, gets into and out of the zone like a rocket ship."


The first V-22 squadron deployed to the Iraq war in late 2007. The Marine Corps is the lead service developing the Bell Helicopter Textron [TXT]- Boeing [BA] aircraft also being built for the Air Force, Navy, and Special Operations Command (SOCOM).


The Marine Corps' current program calls for putting the fourth deployed Osprey squadron on a ship, Conway said. And if his plans to redeploy up to 20,000 Marines from Iraq to the conflict in Afghanistan before the end of the year materialize, he said, at least one V-22 squadron will hit the Afghan airways (Defense Daily, Jan. 26).


"We're going to learn some things when it goes aboard ships, just like we learned some things about its viability in the desert," Conway said.


While the V-22 was tested at length in the U.S. desert, he said once the aircraft arrived in Iraq a slip ring wore out at a faster rate than anticipated because of differences with "the Iraqi dust and dirt and things that we found in the environment there."


"So I suspect just like that, when we get it into a salt-sea kind of environment we're going to learn some things about the maintenance and the requirements of the aircraft there as well," Conway said.


The commandant said the V-22 is "made for a place like Afghanistan" because of its speed and quietness.


The Marine Corps and SOCOM are developing a belly gun for the Osprey before it is sent to Afghanistan, he said. That gun will allow the aircraft to fly alone without being accompanied by other firepower-providing aircraft.


"There's continual product enhancement over what is already a very effective airplane," Conway said.


He said the tilt-rotor aircraft can replace some CH-46 helicopters in Afghanistan, where the older choppers "really started to come up against their match" because of elevated terrain and high temperatures.


When visiting Afghanistan last August, Conway said, he saw single CH-46s carrying just five or six combat-loaded Marines.


"It's high time that we bring aboard the Osprey," he said.


Asked if the V-22 could be used off an amphibious ship in a counter-piracy mission around the horn of Africa, Conway said the service has received no taskings to do that. Yet he said the Osprey "would be a wonderful platform" for efforts to rout pirates out of camps.


"You don't hear the V-22 coming nearly like you do a conventional helicopter," he said. "It can fly higher, it can fly deeper, it can fly faster. So the speed and the shock and the surprise of an attack on those camps would be very much facilitated" by the Osprey.

[Holedigger]

Here is a link to the Osprey's proposed gun package (with video) but don't know if they are moving ahead with it or not. Definatly give it some punch but at what cost to performance and capacity?

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/004449.html

[CAPFlyer]

Very little performance or capacity hit. The package is being designed to normally stay stashed between the floor and the belly of the aircraft and when deployed, the aircraft will be in vertical flight mode, so speed reduction will be negligible. The whole thing weighs like 300 pounds WITH AMMO, so the reduction in payload will be almost nothing as well since with most packages, they run out of space before they run out of weight.

It's a neat little package and I hope it works because they're talking about using it to replace/suppliment CROWS installations on HMMVW's and MRAP's.

[Lynn Allen]

The Bell guys I know are very happy with the current service fleet. They seem a bit quite because they know that ONE incident will bring the press back. There is no good news worth publishing on military programs.....

They are at capacity at the Amarillo plant, building them as fast as they can. The Marines are flying them so much that a release any for airshows or other events is rare. There will not be one here in Ft. Worth for the BELL HELICOPTER Armed Forces Bowl game...

The 609 is flying...Agusta has one flying in Italy with another close to ready and the Bell machine is flying regularly...at least once a week. It is supposed to be at Heli-expo in Houston in February.

I just barely caught it last Friday....at Arlington (KGKY)

It flies over my house all the time. They used to have a Citation chase a/c flying along with it.....

Lynn

[Ztex]

Week before last...


And the chase...

[Lynn Allen]

Zane, they need me to help fly that Citation.....
Thanks for the photo's..

Lynn

[Obergrafeter]

Can the slowtation keep up?

[Jack Cook]

My sister's step son is a Marine Osprey pilot and is stated to deploy with his Sqd in the next month or so. I've forgotten what ship they to be based on though.

[Tailspin Turtle]

Can the slowtation keep up?

We got the Citation for the XV-15 because the KingAir couldn't keep up. When we were on tour with the XV-15, one of the party tricks on departing an airfield was a "formation takeoff," except it was really a drag race. If the tower approved, the Citation would taxi onto the runway and the XV-15 would hover into position beside it. After one, two, three, Go, it was who could get to the other end of the runway fastest. The XV-15 usually won by at least an airplane length, gear up and full airplane mode. There's a great video of it taken at Quantico, if I remember correctly.

[jtramo]

380hr engine TBO in the field....ouch!

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/video/in ... f7c3&rf=bm