‘Widowmaker’ in Fatal Air Crash Linked to 50+ American Deaths

When a U.S. Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey crashed in late August during a training exercise on a remote Australian island, three of the 23 people aboard were killed.

Maj. Tobin Lewis was one of them. A 37-year-old Colorado native with a wife and three young daughters back home, Lewis had been serving as the executive officer of Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 363, an Osprey unit based at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.

The Osprey, which is built by Boeing and Bell Textron, can take off and land like a helicopter, and can also tilt its rotors forward and fly like a high-speed turboprop airplane. It’s a complex $90 million machine offering twice the speed, six times the range, and three times the payload of the Marine Corp’s CH-46E Sea Knight assault support helicopter, according to the Department of Defense.

At the same time, there’s a reason the Osprey is nicknamed “the widowmaker.”

On Nov. 29, an Osprey carrying six members of the U.S. Air Force crashed during a training mission off the coast of Japan. At least one passenger was killed, and five others remain missing amid ongoing search and rescue efforts. The latest accident could bring the total number of Osprey fatalities to 60, since the aircraft’s first flight in 1992. The Japanese government on Thursday asked the U.S. to cease all non-emergency Osprey flights over its territory, where more than 50,000 U.S. troops are stationed, and to resume “only after safety is confirmed,” according to The Asahi Shimbun.

“I think if I were to put any fault on anyone, I would say it’s in our military and government’s ineptitude to fund it correctly, and to keep spare parts on the shelves, and to keep the R&D current,” Lewis’ father, Norman, told The Daily Beast shortly after news emerged of the most recent Osprey disaster. “I recognize they’re very expensive, but they’re asking these pilots to fly airframes that have been rode hard and put away wet. They rush them through training. And they kill them in the process.”

Some argue the Osprey is actually safer than many helicopters and certain jet fighters, and that its reputation as an unmitigated death machine is undeserved. It’s not an inherently “dangerous” plane, just a unique one that doesn’t handle quite the same as a helo or fixed-wing aircraft, thus requiring highly specialized training, they say. Nothing like it has ever taken to the skies before, so, as one analyst wrote after the crash that killed Tobin Lewis, “Every Osprey flight is a learning event for the pilots, the maintenance personnel and the aircraft’s manufacturer.”

Lewis, according to his dad, “believed in the airframe, he thought it was a good airframe.”

Others aren’t so sure. In a 2019 report, the DoD Inspector General said the Osprey continues to suffer from a baked-in engine flaw that has not been fixed “despite more than nine years of… redesign attempts.” The plane has been plagued from the get-go with fatal gearbox and clutch issues, does not perform as promised, and is as expensive to maintain as it is unreliable, according to both military and civilian experts. “This is your periodic reminder that some ambitious aircraft designs were never meant to be,” read one 2014 article, which deemed the Osprey “a piece of junk.”

Nearly a decade later, Capt. John J. Sax was killed, along with four other Marines, in an Osprey that crashed near Glamis, California. The cause of the deadly June 8, 2022, training accident was a “dual hard clutch engagement,” which led to all-out engine failure, according to a USMC investigation report.

“It is clear from the investigation that there was no error on the part of the pilots and aircrew and nothing they could have done to anticipate or prevent this mishap,” the report said. “They were conducting routine flight operations in accordance with applicable regulations when this catastrophic and unanticipated mechanical failure occurred. The investigation also found there was no maintenance error on the part of the team whose job it was to prepare the aircraft to fly on the day of the flight.”

The report said the Marine Corps has been aware of the hard clutch engagement issue since 2010, and blames the flaw for three prior crashes. The Corps insists it has come up with a fix that reduces the likelihood of hard clutch engagement by 99 percent, but has not managed to determine the root cause of the clutch malfunction, military aviation accident attorney Timothy Loranger said.

Loranger, a private pilot and former Marine Corps aircraft mechanic who now focuses on aviation law at Wisner Baum in Los Angeles, is representing Sax’s widow, Amber. She was pregnant with the couple’s second child when Sax died, according to Loranger.

“I think there are a lot of questions about the 99 percent number,” Loranger told The Daily Beast. “If you don’t know what the root cause is, you don’t know if you’ve fixed the problem. The only thing to do is wait and see if there’s another malfunction like this. That’s very disconcerting for the people who operate this aircraft.”

The impact on military families has been “tremendous,” according to Loranger.

“From a human standpoint, it’s just devastating,” Loranger said. “It’s hard on people in the service, the spouses and children of servicemembers are watching their father and mothers and husbands and wives [continue to] get into this aircraft… and that’s really tough for them.”

Loranger finds the ongoing Osprey fatalities especially frustrating, because, he said, “I was in the Marine Corps back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and people were talking [even then] about it being dangerous.”

One of the major concerns about the Osprey is that most of its crashes have occurred not in combat, but on training runs, which “should be a less challenging environment,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Hartung, whose work focuses on the defense industry and military procurement, told The Daily Beast that he views the Osprey as “certainly one of the most dangerous aircraft that the United States has.”

To make matters worse, Osprey pilots are not flying as many training hours as before, and maintenance spending has been reduced, to make way for what Hartung called “big-ticket procurement items.” But, he emphasized, the lives of the pilots “should take precedence over any attempt to do a quick fix or paper this over.”

Writ large, military aviation is far more dangerous than its civilian counterpart, according to a December 2020 report to Congress by the National Commission on Military Aviation Safety (NCMAS). The commission—which included, among others, two retired four-star military aviators, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, a onetime acting Secretary of the Air Force, and a former Navy helicopter pilot White House Military Office director responsible for both Air Force One and Marine One— tallied some 6,000 non-combat military aviation accidents between 2013 and 2020, with 224 fatalities.

By comparison, regularly scheduled commercial carriers in the U.S. were involved in roughly 300 accidents between 2010 and 2019, with a total of 16 fatalities.

The panel blamed “insufficient flight hours” for pilots’ “decreasing proficiency,” along with inadequate training, excessive administrative duties, fluctuating levels of funding, “risky” maintenance practices, and a “relentless operations tempo.” And while civilian flight operations are, by design, less hazardous than military ones, “[i]n studying military aviation mishaps, the Commission found that the overwhelming majority of mishaps could not be attributed to the inherent risk of military aviation,” the report said.

With budgets regularly being cut or reallocated, pilots are getting less and less time flying actual planes and more time in flight simulators, according to Rear Admiral Terence McKnight (Ret.). But, said McKnight, who oversaw 3,000 sailors, Marines, and a squadron of Ospreys as commander of the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge, “simulators are not the same.”

“You can stop and start over, you can’t do that when you’re out there flying an aircraft,” McKnight told The Daily Beast. “Look at the last couple of months: we lost two Ospreys, we had a P-8 Poseidon down in Hawaii that went off the runway… We’ve had several major aircraft incidents, and that could reflect on the training hours.”

Further, the more complex a weapons system is, the harder it becomes to keep it up and running, according to Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain now working as a senior defense policy fellow at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. The Air Force last year reported a so-called mission-capable rate for the Osprey of 51 percent. And when a plane is in the shop, a pilot has no choice but to train on a simulator, Grazier said.

On top of all this, Hartung thinks the Osprey program may have been hamstrung from its inception, noting, “There’s been a long history of problems with weapons systems where they’re trying to have multiple capabilities at once.”

By way of example, Hartung pointed to the F-35, a plane which “is supposed to have a vertical takeoff and landing version, and a fighter version, and a bomber version, but has had all kinds of defects and has been sitting in the hangar and is still not out of the woods.”

In the world of military procurement, there’s no such thing as a quick turnaround. Fielding even the simplest replacement for something like the Osprey would take years, according to Hartung. If defense leaders “settled for something that works, instead of, like, the highest possible technological level,” maintaining the platform and training people on it would be a lot more effective, he said. However, Hartung said this would require “a major change in outlook about how [the U.S. military] develops weapons.”

The Osprey plays a distinct role in Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force operations, Hartung explained. But, he said, “If you’re losing pilots, I think that should weigh heavily on a decision [to either ground it pending a fix] or even see if there’s something in the current arsenal that could partially fulfill that goal.”

“They really need to get to the bottom of this,” Hartung said. “And if they can’t make them safe, maybe they need to ground them and find another alternative, however difficult that might be.”

The Osprey’s crucial importance is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, according to Grazier.

He told The Daily Beast he recalled “a number of people jumping up and down in the early 2000s saying, ‘This is dangerous,’ and, ‘We need to cancel this program.’”

“But the services had put a lot of money into [it], and designed operational concepts around the Osprey,” Grazier said, noting that a great amount of “intellectual effort” had been invested in designing war plans with the then-unproven Osprey in mind.

The Marine Corps variant of the Osprey was intended to help shuttle Marines from ship to shore during combat operations, Grazier explained. It was developed to overwhelm an enemy beach at the same time as the Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), an amphibious landing craft later canceled “due to poor reliability… and excessive cost growth.”

The Osprey, which Grazier said, “works, kind of, but not exactly the way the Marine Corps expected it to,” remained in service. One of the aircraft’s main selling points was the ability to quickly insert and extract troops into war zones, according to Grazier.

But the Osprey’s particular rotor configuration makes it especially susceptible to a potentially deadly aerodynamic condition brought on by rapid descents. This means Ospreys have to be very gentle when landing, “so it doesn’t perform the way it was supposed to perform,” Grazier said. “In general, the Osprey really hasn’t lived up to the original promise.”

Back in Colorado, Norman and Kathy Lewis continue to mourn the loss of their son. He wanted to be a military pilot, like his grandfather, ever since he was a child, according to his family. Tobin Lewis’ deployment to Australia in August, which would turn out to be his last, was a chance for him to help some of the greener pilots under his command get qualified in the Osprey.

“They don’t have enough pilots, so they’re always being deployed,” Norman Lewis said on Wednesday. “They don’t get the rest they need. And it takes so long for an Osprey pilot to become fully qualified, by the time they get there, they’re too tired to stay on. So, we’re always dealing with a young fleet of Osprey pilots. It’s just a complicated issue, because of the way we fund and treat the military.”