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Full Tilt Ahead
Written by Leslie Shaver
SOTECH 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 1 (February)
In the past two years, the tilt-rotor aircraft has been tested with three different squadron deployments (totaling 18 months) to Iraq, a Marine expeditionary unit (MEU) deployment, and its first mission in Afghanistan. And the Air Force has deployed its sister aircraft, the CV-22, in Iraq for one deployment.
“We have more flight hours in the past two years than in the previous 18 years of flying the V-22,” said Masiello, who heads the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command’s V-22 Osprey program. “We learned an awful lot as we crested 67,000 flight hours.”
If the feedback from those using the aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan is any indication, the program seems to be working, despite charges through the years that program was unsafe and well over budget. After 30 people lost their lives flying the aircraft, which is produced by Bell Helicopter and Boeing, there have been no lives lost since December 2000. Masiello and the pilots who have flown the aircraft said deployments have shown there are few tweaks needed. But Masiello has used deployment to guide changes in maintenance and is now focused on working with industry to support the program.
“I don’t think we’ve made any very specific change in capabilities because of lessons learned in Iraq, and we don’t anticipate that right now based upon our shipboard deployments or Afghanistan deployments,” he said.
EXPERIENCES FROM DEPLOYMENT
Since the early ’80s, the services have seen the value in the Osprey, a medium lift transport vehicle that has the ability to fly with the speed and capacity of an airplane and land like a helicopter. It’s just taken a while for those dreams to become reality. After the DoD approved full-rate production for the MV-22 in September 2005, the aircraft was deployed to Iraq in October 2007.
The MV-22 has an air speed of up to 282 knots and can drop 24 warriors as far away as 325 miles—all massively exceeding the capabilities of its predecessor, the CH-46 Sea Knight. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel. Rob Freeland said those capabilities provide a tremendous amount of versatility and can turn what used to be a two-day mission into a one-day trek.
“That’s a pretty impressive distance to carry 24 troops,” Freeland said, who has logged more than 1,000 hours on the machines, including some time in Iraq. “It broadens a MAGTAF [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] commander’s ability to put boots on the ground.”
Lieutenant Colonel Shawn Cameron has been equally as pleased with speed shown by the Air Forces’ 8th Special Operations Squadron’s CV-22s, which have additional fuel capacity, enhanced navigation, communications and avionics systems, multi-mode terrain following/terrain avoidance radar, and systems to detect and defeat radar-guided and heat-seeking missiles.
“As a former helicopter pilot returning to Iraq, I was continually amazed at the reduced time it took us to travel across Iraq,” he said. “The ability to fly faster and farther allowed the ground force more flexibility in their planning.”
But it’s not the V-22’s speed or payload that has most surprised Marines who have flown the aircraft in Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Bianca, VMM-261 commanding officer, has used the Osprey to drop Marines at night in the Northeastern region of the Helmand province near the city of Now Zad. And that city is no easy place to drop Marines, considering it lies in a mountain valley at approximately 4,000 feet above sea level and is surrounded by higher mountains up to 10,000 feet above sea level.
“The Osprey continues to fly daily missions in support of the entire Helmand Province operations area, and on occasion is used to fly to other provinces due to its range, speed and ability to land anywhere,” Bianca said.
The swirling sand and dust in brownouts stirred up in the desert is one of many occupational hazards a helicopter pilot faces in Iraq. Freeland was moved by how the flyby- wire flight control system of the MV-22 made that a moot point. By pushing a button, the pilot commands the aircraft holds a stable hover.
“The pilot has only to retard the thrust control lever while the aircraft maintains its longitudinal and lateral position all the way to the ground,” Freeland said. “This capability, along with using the velocity vector and instantaneous acceleration cue on the hover display page to shoot manual approaches, gives the V-22 Osprey one of the most robust brownout landing capabilities of any aircraft in the inventory.”
ANTICIPATED UPGRADES
Despite the rave reviews, the pilots who have flown the MV-22 and CV-22 say there are areas that could use tweaking or next generation (Block C) upgrades that they’re eagerly anticipating.
“We are looking at improvements to our radio and icing protection systems, as well as continuing the development of a forward firing weapon,” Cameron said. “Some minor improvements are also being looked at regarding the FLIR [imaging] and cabin setup.”
So far, the MV-22 has gone through two blocks of production. The first, Block A for the Marine Corps came into the fleet in August 2003. The second, Block B, which was delivered in December 2005, added redesigned hydraulics and capability improvements, including the M-240D ramp mounted weapons system, hoist and fast-rope kits, a retractable refueling probe, ice protection gear, and wing auxiliary fuel tanks.
While the MV-22s in the first block (Block A) are being used as training assets, the second generation (Block B) is flying in Afghanistan. Block C upgrades are being mixed into the MV-22s in Block B being deployed right now.
“If funding and mission articulated that we upgrade new systems from Block C into other aircraft, we were able to do that,” Masiello said. “We were able to bring some elements of the Block C forward into the aircraft we’re currently operating.”
The upgrades include a global positioning system (GPS), which could prove advantageous to Marines being inserted into the field. “Often you would get out of a helicopter and you’d have to wait for a few seconds while [the GPS] acquires satellites and tells you where you are,” Masiello said. “An improvement in Block C is that it allows you to rebroadcast off of the aircraft receivers into those handheld devices, so that the individual Marine actually has that information in their GPS so they don’t have to wait to acquire another satellite.”
The Block C MV-22s also have a moving map for the troop commander so that they know exactly where they’re being dropped off, so they can follow the flight path and things that are going on around them.
Chaff and flare (as part of the Forward ALE-47), VHF/UHF line-of-sight/SATCOM radio interface for the troop commander, an upgraded environmental control system, and the relocation of the MV-22 ice detectors and four forward firing buckets are also being incorporated in the Block B Ospreys. In the future, the plane will get an enhanced standby flight instrument and weather radar to help Marines know what’s ahead.
“The weather radar, one of the Block C upgrades, will improve our ability to operate safely in the face of weather phenomenon in theater, at home, and during self-deployment,” Freedland said.
MAINTENANCE LESSONS
Operational experiences didn’t provide the only lessons for the Marines and Air Force with the V-22 in Iraq. Masiello contends that lessons learned over the past couple of years have helped his team make huge strides in maintenance of the MV-22.
“We do learn lessons from being deployed in Iraq,” Masiello said. “We have maintainability and reliability improvements that we make on the platform and that we can introduce over time. From the program office, we look across the board at maintenance practices, in terms of lessons learned.”
These lessons have led to a pivotal change in parts (published reports said replenishing parts was an earlier issue in deployment for the Marines). The Marine Corps codes parts as repairable or consumable. Through experience, it’s been able to identify a number of components, like fairings, that it will now be able to repair. The main advantage to repairing—cost savings.
“We’ve gone back through the breadth and depth of our components and we were able to identify 387 components that we will recode as repairable instead of consumable,” Masiello said. “We’ve learned that if it gets a ding, instead of throwing it away and buying a new one, these are things that we can repair.”
The Marine Corps is also ramping up depot level repair capability at the fleet readiness center at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N.C. The depot level of service is the third step of maintenance behind repair tasks performed on flight lines and the intermediate level (where parts go after the flight line). At the depot level, government depots handle the parts instead of sending them back to the industry.
“[The depots] have their initial capability of government support as opposed to industry- based support,” Masiello said. “That’s a transition for us. All of those I think meld together into overall strategy that I would call our in-service transition.”
Over the years, the contractors have gone from a development mindset to production mindset. Now, they’re in an inservice perspective. Right now, fleet support teams from the contractors are at different locations.
“Our challenge is to incentivize our industry base,” Masiello said. “It’s easy in development when you have a series of contracts saying what they’re trying to develop and then, in production, it’s very straightforward. It [in-service] is making sure we have the right process and infrastructure, and going through the breadth and depth of the supply chain in making sure that we have all of the parts out there.” ♦