Air Force gets ready to bring back troubled aircraft for full deployment despite ongoing safety concerns

The Air Force is gearing up to bring back the historically troubled Osprey aircraft for fleet-wide deployment, despite ongoing concerns over safety and reliability, Military.com reported Wednesday.

The Osprey — an aircraft that can take off vertically like a helicopter and fly horizontally like a plane using tiltrotor propellers — was grounded in December following a string of deadly crashes as a result of mechanical failures. The ban was partially lifted in March, and now the Air Force is preparing to return the Osprey to full deployment in the coming months, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley told reporters on Wednesday, according to Military.com.

“As of right now, we’re about 60% of the fleet that’s returned to flying. We’ve got about the same number of aircrew that are returned fully,” Conley told reporters at the Air and Space Force Association conference in Washington, D.C., according to Military.com. “So, we will, along with our two overseas wings that have CV-22s that are almost back to full mission readiness, we will deploy out here in the coming weeks back to support other geographic commanders.”

The Joint Program Office previously limited Ospreys’ flight to no more than 30 minutes away from a safe landing site, but Conley said that any restrictions imposed on the Osprey by the aircraft’s Joint Program Office won’t apply to how combatant commanders can choose to use them.

Conley also said he anticipates that the entire 51 Ospreys in the fleet will be ready for deployment by late 2024 or early 2025, according to Military.com. The chief of the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), which controls the Joint Program Office, previously predicted that the fleet wouldn’t be fully operational by mid-2025.

The decision to bring the Osprey back into the full Air Force fleet is likely to be controversial, especially among the families who lost their relatives in crashes. There have been more than 40 Osprey accidents since 2007, resulting in 30 deaths, 20 of which occurred in the last two years.

These crashes are often the result of issues with the Osprey craft’s tiltrotor system, which involves a complex set of gears and mechanisms.

“The fear many surviving family members continue to have is that the failures that caused the loss of their loved one have not been fully addressed and corrected,” Amber Sax, the wife of Capt. John Sax, who died in a 2022 Osprey crash, told Military.com. “The thought of 20 or more, given the number of lives an Osprey can carry, haunts many of us daily. We need to know it’s been fixed and it won’t happen again.”

The NAVAIR chief, who oversees the Joint Program Office, previously predicted that the Osprey fleet wouldn’t be ready until mid-2025, according to Military.com. But Conley was confident the program could be brought back sooner, he told reporters.

“To be blunt about it, I would not put the men and women of AFSOC back in the plane if I wasn’t confident that it could do what we needed to do,” Conley said.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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