The Hydraulics issue addressed:
The hydraulic leaks that had plagued the Osprey - and caused the last crash - required an entirely different kind of problem-solving. Engineers on the ground would have to rip the engines apart and start over. The investigation into the 2001 accident showed that a tangle of tubes in a nacelle had chafed against a main hydraulics line. Chafing had been a problem for years; the titanium hydraulic tubes are ultralightweight but brittle and relatively fragile.
The solution seemed obvious: Rejigger the plane's hundreds of feet of hydraulic lines so none of them touch. But that meant remodeling the guts of the nacelles, finding new space for fuel and electrical lines as well. "The technology wasn't in question," says Don Courson, the lead hydraulic engineer. "It was more of a design issue."
So Courson's team stripped a nacelle down to its frame and panels. Then, system by system, they started replacing parts - the prop rotor gearbox, the tilt axis mechanism, the engine. Finally, they redesigned and reinstalled the hydraulics lines.
The Vortex Ring State problem that caused the second crash:
The third and fourth accidents, though, were trickier. Even two years after the third Osprey went down, pilots and designers worried about the mysterious aerodynamic problem of vortex ring state. The problem was that nobody knew much about VRS. When airplane wings or helicopter rotor blades cut through the air, they create a region of low pressure above them and high pressure below. That differential creates lift, but maintaining it depends on the smooth flow of air over both surfaces. Spinning helicopter blades turn the air beneath that high-pressure zone into chop - drop into that turbulence and the air stops sticking to the blades. The prop stops pushing, and the bird stops flying.
Lead test pilot Tom MacDonald of Boeing was assigned the VRS problem. "It was this mystery area," he says. "So little research had been done on it. People wondered: Would it swallow planes alive?"
MacDonald and the engineers worked out a system. He'd take the plane to 10,000 feet, putting enough air between him and the ground so he'd be able to recover if he got into trouble. Then he'd pull the nacelles back until they were almost vertical, in helicopter conformation, slow his forward airspeed, and try to induce VRS.
"We'd fly all day long," says Gross, copilot on a few of the test runs. "We'd fall 2,000 or 3,000 feet and recover. We'd fly back up to 10,000 feet, repeat the exercise at 1,000 feet per minute, then 1,500, then 2,000, all the way up to 5,000 feet per minute. Then we'd do it again, this time changing our airspeed." (A typical rate of descent for a 747 passenger jet on runway approach is 700 to 800 feet per minute.) In the process MacDonald, a former Marine pilot, quadrupled the published knowledge base on VRS.
What he found was that vortex ring state is surprisingly hard to induce. He had to fly slower than 40 knots while keeping the plane in a steady position for at least five seconds, and then descend at a hot 2,200 feet per minute. He also found that in an Osprey, he could recover from the condition relatively easily, provided he had 2,000 feet of altitude to play with. In the end, the team didn't alter the aircraft. Solution: Install a simple warning system. When a pilot pushes an Osprey toward VRS, a light flashes in the cockpit and a voice cautions, "Sink rate." And Osprey pilots now know to pay attention to those warnings.
What do you know? It survives better than Helocopters. Anything else from TIME Magazine you would like to repeat? There is deliberate misinformation and repeats of old test/accidents that negate new tech and fixes the bird has recieved. Really now, 2000 was the last accident the Osprey had regarding system failures and issues with the dual rotor config. If it needs to land while in plane mode, the rotors are designed to crumple and bend in accordance to a safe crash landing as opposed to ripping apart the craft as they careen into the side of the fuselage.
If the bird has to go down in hover, it will be no different than a Blackhawk, Apache, Chinook, etc.. except for the fact that it can continue to fly on one rotor. Hmm, something those other birds cannot do.
If it fails, then I will agree, but we need to see how it works in the field. I mean, I can go on a real tangent and discuss the failures of the M-1 Abrams as it was released to the success it is today. The tank that rolled off the assembly line day one is not the same beast.
Unsafe Airframe? Let's give it a chance.
References:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.0 ... topic_set=
Some other thread another Dev posted a movie with C-130 take off.