They're hiding their crash and lousy maintenance record, but they can only do so much.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1666282,00.html
by Mark Thompson:
It's hard to imagine an American weapons program so fraught with problems that Dick Cheney would try repeatedly to cancel it — hard, that is, until you get to know the Osprey. As Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, Cheney tried four times to kill the Marine Corps's ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. Four times he failed. Cheney found the arguments for the combat troop carrier unpersuasive and its problems irredeemable. "Given the risk we face from a military standpoint, given the areas where we think the priorities ought to be, the V-22 is not at the top of the list," he told a Senate committee in 1989. ...

The world is ending.

The Osprey concept is a "small wars" machine -- put special forces in, get them out, begone. Cheney's always been a "shock and awe" kind of military planner.

That said, this platform has been fubar from the get-go.

I was stationed at MCAS Yuma when that horrible accident occurred back in 2000.

and one of the office visitors, a computational physicist familiar with the Osprey said that no one really understands the physics behind it. We didn't even have a good computational model for the vehicle.

It's easy to view something as bad if you only look at the bad data. you have to remember that

A) this is a troop transport so deaths should be looked at comparatively, a crashed fighter-jet would only kill the pilot for example, so if you just look at deaths a fighter jet that crashes more often than a troop transport would be viewed as safer because the crew is 1 maybe 2, compared to a troop transport that can carry several soldiers.

B) design differences between testing and production.

(B) I am not sure what you mean

I hope you enjoyed the melodrama expressed by Time Magazine.

Imagine having to turn in a rough draft along with a final version of a report in school and having the errors in the rough draft counted against you regardless of the fact that you fixed the errors.

at I'd say 15,000 feet. We live out in the country, and I could hear it coming a ways off. At first, it sounded like a chopper (vibrations in the air like that of the powerful, local "Eurocopter" trauma chopper flying past), but as it got closer it sounded like a turboprop-- most choppers and planes are powered by jet engines, so I guess that makes sense. But when I looked up, I could see that it was an Osprey. Strange-looking, especially at mid altitude. I'd only ever seen video of one / low to the ground/landing (Without Incident).

I have friends who worked on the software for this aircraft. They were coding up Boeing pseudo code. When the code fit in memory, it wouldn't pass unit tests and when it passed unit tests it wouldn't fit into memory. It was done over and over. That was back in the 90's. The control of the two rotors is an accident waiting to happen .... oh.

Buy a field and wait.

An old, rather sad "joke" about the F-104 "Widow Maker" that seems even more applicable to the Osprey.

...this debacle of an aircraft.

this corporate welfare project?