The training tragedy that has killed three US marines in the crash of a tilt-rotor MV22 Osprey in Queensland has turned into a much more complicated diplomatic story in Japan, where Tokyo has asked Washington DC to stop flying the aircraft into its airspace.
To understand how this could be so at a time when Korea tensions have brought the US and Japan even closer together requires the long-running context of contests over national pride and identity and the role of US bases in Japan to be considered.
It isn’t really abut the manifest safety risks of the Osprey, which has assumed the title of Widowmaker in some media — the safety risks it poses pale into triviality compared to the dangers from Japan’s poorly designed or maintained nuclear reactors, for example.
And the safety risks of the Osprey shouldn’t be an issue in Australia either.
Here’s why. On the scary side of the ledger of fairness, the Osprey would never meet any of the civilian safety and certification standards of an aircraft anywhere in the world. It is both inherently clever and ferociously dangerous in design, being both a helicopter and a fast turbo-prop transport able to facilitate otherwise impossible mission outcomes to a defence force.
These are limitations a military culture would — indeed, must — accept.
The Osprey killed 30 people in its development in the US before entering service in 2007. Since then, there have been six crashes killing 14 people, including three in Queensland.
The toll taken by the Osprey since 2007 isn’t abnormal put beside the longer history of accidents suffered by the RAAF using comparatively small fractions of the world’s Mirage 111 and F-111 fleets of “old”.
The RAAF’s record with newer F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets is much better. So far. When it inevitably loses even one JSF F-35 Lightning it will not only be tragic but a national economic setback of unprecedented magnitude, given the costs of the yet-to-arrive-and-perform-to-specifications “wonder jet”.
The “Widowmaker” title applied to the Osprey really needs to go back to its original holder, the F-104 Starfighter single pilot supersonic interceptor jet of the late 1950s and ’60s. Almost 2600 Starfighters were built, and of the 700 ordered by West Germany alone, 298 were destroyed in crashes that killed a total of 116 pilots. It suffered from a bad operational record with the other major users the air forces of the US, Japan and Turkey, although the outcomes depended on the variables of missions, purposes and training issues.
A significant number of these accidents, and for that matter some of the Osprey crashes, have been traced to human error or less than optimal training.
The number of Ospreys in use today is around 200.
The risks visiting Ospreys pose to Australia are immeasurably small for the population at large, as is the case in Japan. However, the risks for those who fly in them will always remain uncomfortably large.
And let’s not forget the Australian made GAF Nomad. Serious structural problems around the ill-positioned horizontal stabiliser and a very tricky CofG, made for a very dangerous aircraft indeed.
Good article, but suggesting that the death toll from the Osprey is less than that from Japanese reactors is inaccurate. No one has been killed by reactors in Japan. However the fear mongers who drove Japan to the edge of panic in 2011 have their sights on the Osprey for essentially the same reason – anti-military political malice.
Fix the typo in the email title, Widwomaker.
Because it had quotation marks I kept waiting for the joke – some play of the Womak muzak duo or similar.
How do you compare an F-111 and and Osprey? F-111 had a crew of 2, the Osprey can carry 24 troops.
Paul Guy,
Of course no-one would compare the mission profiles of an F-111 and an Osprey. The frequency of a hull loss in which there was at least one fatality among those on board is the test that generally illuminates attempts to compare the safety of airliner types that can be of very different sizes or configurations or that very different creature, the effective safety cultures of operators, regardless of what they are flying.In this case the intent was to look fairly at the risks inherent in the Ospreys and suggest they do not deserve to be inflated by tabloid tendencies.
That’s well spotted, the other thing I notice is that you can write this whole article without any reference to accident rate per flight hour, per passenger mile, or per mission/conditions.
The F104 used by the Germany had one major difference from other F104s – the ejection seat was such that in use it ejected downwards, thereby causing interesting situations at low and ground level.