It took twenty years and $19 bil­lion. But at 4pm today, I’m told, the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board will announce its rec­om­men­da­tion to go ahead with “full rate pro­duc­tion” of the once star-​​crossed, accident-​​prone Osprey V-​​22 tiltro­tor craft.
The fate of the hybrid air­craft has been very much in ques­tion, ever since a pair of Ospreys crashed in 2000, killing 23. This deci­sion “gets the pro­gram off pro­ba­tion. It can’t be sum­mar­ily can­celled now,” a source close to the pro­gram says.
It’s not exactly clear how many of the hybrid air­craft will even­tu­ally be man­u­fac­tured. The President pro­posed bud­get calls for 458 Ospreys to be built into the next decade, start­ing with 13 next fis­cal year. The Marines are ulti­mately sched­uled to get 360 air­craft, Special Operations Command are sup­posed to have 50, and the Navy is slated to have 48. “Pentagon bud­get doc­u­ments show the cost of V-​​22s at about $100 mil­lion each,” the Star-​​Telegram notes. Osprey mak­ers Bell Helicopter say the fig­ure is more like “$72 mil­lion and headed down.“
Those prices and those plans could change in the years to come, of course. But this much is set: A squadron of pilots starts train­ing on the V-​​22 next week. And an oper­a­tional squadron of nine Ospreys will be ready to fly out of North Carolina’s Marine Corps Air Station New River by 2007.
THERE’S MORE: Inside Defense has the report from the Pentagon’s test­ing office, which gave the thumbs-​​up to the V-​​22.
AND MORE: The watch­dogs at the Project on Government Oversight still aren’t con­vinced. “It cant autoro­tate to a safe land­ing, has no defen­sive gun, lacks the abil­ity to per­form quick eva­sive com­bat maneu­vers under fire, and cant descend too quickly or it will go into a dan­ger­ous roll,” they say.
AND MORE: The Osprey’s final two crashes were due to a mys­te­ri­ous aero­nau­ti­cal phe­nom­e­non known as “vor­tex ring state.” after re-​​reading Wired’s Osprey story, I can’t say I feel too good about how that’s been dealt with.

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.