How the V-22 Osprey’s crash history earned it the nickname of ‘the widow-maker’

As the development budget increased and concern surrounding the Osprey’s viability grew, the Marine Corps held a special test flight in Washington to secure congressional approval.

In 1992, six years after the initial contract was awarded to Bell and Boeing, 40 Marines, Navy officers, and Bell-Boeing representatives gathered at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, to witness the experimental V-22 Osprey in flight.

However, while the V-22 was rotating its engines and propellers to begin its descent, the right engine ignited, causing it to crash into the Potomac River — about a half mile short of the runway. All seven passengers — three Marines and four Boeing employees — were killed in the crash.

A Navy investigation into the incident found that “the primary cause of the mishap was a flammable fluid leak which was ingested by the right engine.”

By the summer of 2000, the military’s V-22 project was $3 billion over budget and eight years behind schedule, and it had already been involved in the deaths of nearly two dozen people.

Some Congress members and then-incoming Vice President Dick Cheney, who previously opposed the V-22 program as defense secretary, began looking for ways to kill the project entirely because of the rising costs and technological issues.

With mounting pressure to produce results, officials working on the V-22 project began cutting corners and falsifying information.

“We need to lie or manipulate the data, or however you wanna call it,” Odin Leberman, then a lieutenant colonel and Osprey squadron commander at the Corps’ New River air base in Florida, said in a meeting, which was secretly recorded by a maintenance crew member, CNN reported in 2001.

On December 11, 2000, tragedy struck yet again. Ten miles outside Jacksonville, North Carolina, a V-22 Osprey crashed in a remote area during an approach landing exercise, falling 1,600 feet and killing all four Marines on board.

The crash report indicated that, during the training mission, the reset button on board the Osprey lit up, prompting the pilots to push it at least eight or 10 times in an attempt to correct the aircraft.

But constant resetting “started a chain of unpredicted and uncontrollable events that caused alternating deceleration and acceleration of the aircraft,” Martin Berndt, then a Marine Corps major general, told reporters at the Pentagon.

A common design problem on the V-22s was chafing in the hydraulic system, which sometimes resulted in hydraulic lines rupturing. To compensate for this problem, the pilots hit the reset button. Investigators later discovered that a glitch in the aircraft’s software caused the plane to decelerate with each press of the button, resulting in the crash.

On December 12, 2000, the V-22 Osprey was grounded for the first — but not the last — time.

During the decade that began in 2010, the V-22 Osprey killed eight people across eight crashes as a result of continued technological and hardware issues.

In 2010, only three years after its official launch, an Osprey’s engine stalled while preparing to drop off a squad of US Army Rangers in southern Afghanistan, causing the plane to descend rapidly.

The pilot was able to land the aircraft to reduce the severity of impact, but the nose of the plane crashed into the sand and flipped it over, killing four of the 20 passengers on board.

An Air Force investigator initially attributed the deadly crash to engine problems, but the decision was later overruled by his superior officer, changing the primary cause of the crash to pilot error.

Donald Harvel, then a brigadier general with the Air Force and lead investigator in the crash probe, told Air Force Times that he felt “a lot of pressure” to change his report.

“I turned [my report] in, and I knew that my career was done,” Harvel told Wired in 2012.

A spokesperson for the Air Force Special Operations Command at the time denied that he was pressured by higher-ranking Air Force officers to shift the blame away from the Osprey.

In November 2023, a V-22 Osprey crashed off the coast of Japan, killing eight airmen. The crash resulted in the US military grounding the entire V-22 Osprey fleet to solve the problems.

A highly anticipated Air Force investigation found that a “catastrophic” gearbox failure and the crew’s “lack of urgency throughout the entire mishap sequence” were to blame for the tragic crash.

Warning lights alerted the aircrew during the flight that metal chips were flaking off inside the gearbox, but the pilot decided to fly on in accordance with official guidance. Air Force officials, however, have suggested that Osprey program officials failed to communicate the severe risks that these so-called “chip alerts” posed.

Families and widows of those who have died in previous Osprey crashes were reluctant to believe the plane was ready to fly again.

Rep. James Comer, a chairman of the House Oversight Committee, criticized the decision to resume V-22 flights, noting the number of unanswered questions and concerns involving the aircraft.

“Serious concerns remain, such as accountability measures put in place to prevent crashes, a general lack of transparency, how maintenance and operational upkeep is prioritized, and how DoD assesses risks,” Comer said in a statement at the time.

Data from the Navy and Air Force estimated that the Osprey has been involved in about 50 deaths since becoming operational in 2007.

Though the Osprey can now operate in a limited capacity, NAVAIR Commander Vice Adm. Carl Chebi said that his office, which oversees the V-22 program, will continue to review manning, training, and equipment for the aircraft for another six to nine months. He added that the military doesn’t expect to resume full operations of its hundreds of Ospreys until at least 2025.

“As we have findings from the comprehensive review, I will take the necessary actions to ensure continued safe flight operations,” Chebi said during a congressional hearing in June.