Osprey Fire Injures Marine

DT friend and Osprey inves­tiga­tive reporter for the Ft. Worth Star-​​Telegram Bob Cox sent me an alarm­ing note today. Turns out a V-​​22 at New River caught fire in the nacelle a month ago and no one seemed to catch it until now (yep, not until after the $10 bil­lion con­tract award for 167 new MV-​​22s). According to Bob’s inves­ti­ga­tion, this isn’t a new problem.

And it looks like there’s still more con­cern about an oil cool­ing sys­tem that’s mal­func­tion­ing, risk­ing gear box damage.

From the Star-Telegram’s Sky Talk blog:

Just two weeks prior to that award, yet another Osprey oper­ated by Marines in North Carolina suf­fered an engine nacelle fire, a recur­ring prob­lem. The good folks at Amarillo​.com backed into the story a few days ago with a nice story on a local Marine who had to be hos­pi­tal­ized for inhal­ing too much fire sup­pres­sant while extin­guish­ing the blaze.

No word yet on the degree of dam­age to the air­craft, which was appar­ently on ground at the time prepar­ing to take off. A sim­i­lar fire a few months ago, that broke out in flight and required an emer­gency land­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere, essen­tially destroyed the engine nacelle — the com­part­ment on the end of the wing that con­tains the jet tur­bine engine — and left the wing itself in very bad shape, accord­ing to both Marine and Bell sources.

The Marines have had a num­ber of these fires over the last cou­ple of years but for­tu­nately none have caused a crash. No word on whether there have been any fires involv­ing V-​​22s in Iraq, which were the first to have a nacelle fire pre­ven­tion fix installed. What hap­pens is hydraulic and other flam­ma­ble flu­ids leak inside the nacelle and then get ignited by hot engine components.

The Marines have acknowl­edged that the Osprey’s reli­a­bil­ity in Iraq (and state­side) con­tin­ues to be less than desired and now have said the aircraft’s engines are wear­ing way too fast. Then this week we learned of another sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem that has popped up in Iraq.

It seems that the oil cool­ing sys­tem that sup­plies both a gen­er­a­tor and one of the tilt-​​rotor gear­boxes has a nasty ten­dency to go bad, allow­ing tem­per­a­tures to rise to lev­els that could dam­age the gear box com­po­nents. On four occa­sions V-​​22s at for­ward bases were grounded until repairs could be made. gen­er­a­tors aboard the air­craft has a prob­lem with its oil cool­ing system. 

An inter­nal Marine mem­o­ran­dum says it has been very for­tu­nate that the cool­ing sys­tem hasn’t failed in flight and forced a flight crew to make an emer­gency land­ing in hos­tile ter­ri­tory. The memo says the oil cool­ing sys­tem is last­ing just 25 per­cent of its expected life. 

All I can say is that when I spoke with main­tain­ers, pilots, crew chiefs and squadron offi­cials in Iraq, noth­ing like this came up. They men­tioned slip ring fail­ures and avion­ics hic­cups from the fine dust, but noth­ing as alarm­ing as nacelle fires and oil cool­ing sys­tem failures.

And a Marine spokesman told me the fire on March 14 hap­pened because some­one neglected to remove an engine intake cover. I should have more on this later.

So, thanks again to Bob Cox for the head’s up.

– Christian

April 17th, 2008 | Grand Ole Osprey | 279110 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/04/17/osprey-fire-injures-marine/Osprey+Fire+Injures+Marine2008-04-17+19%3A03%3A26Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.