V-22 Thread - Navy Decides to Buy V-22 Ospreys for Carrier

[JanMasterson]

By RICHARD WHITTLE on January 13, 2015 at 11:13 AM
http://breakingdefense.com/2015/01/navy ... -delivery/



The Navy will buy V-22 Osprey tiltrotors to replace its aging C-2A Greyhound turboprop aircraft in flying carrier on board delivery (COD) missions. Breaking Defense obtained a Jan. 5 memo, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford. It stipulates that the Navy will buy four V-22s each year from fiscal 2018 to 2020.

The MOU marks a major triumph for the Naval Air Systems Command V-22 program office, the Marine Corps and other Osprey advocates, who have argued for years that the Navy should replace its aging conventional take off C-2As with vertical take off and landing V-22s.

“The Navy is responsible for modifying these V-22s into an HV-22 configuration for the COD mission,” the MOU states. “The parties agree that subsequent documents will provide details on the concept of operations and milestones. A memorandum of agreement will detail reimbursable Marine Corps support for the Navy’s HV-22 transition, which includes training and potential deployment of Marine MV-22 aircraft and personnel to support COD requirements.”

The Navy-Marine Corps agreement must be ratified in the next defense budget and by Congress. It also depends in part on a prospective third V-22 multiyear procurement contract that would begin in fiscal year 2018. C-2A maker Northrop Grumman has proposed building a modernized version incorporating features of the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye tactical early warning aircraft.

The twin-engine turboprop C-2As carry cargo, mail and passengers between aircraft carriers and shore — a mission called COD for “carrier on-board delivery.” The first Greyhound prototypes flew in 1964.The Osprey, built in a 50-50 partnership by Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. and Boeing Co. and in service with the Marine Corps since 2007 and the Air Force since 2009, tilts two large wingtip rotors up to take off and land vertically and forward to fly like a turboprop airplane, giving it far greater speed and range than conventional helicopters.



The MOU signed by Mabus, Greenert and Dunford marks a milestone in the history of the revolutionary V-22, which began in the early 1980s at the behest of Navy Secretary John Lehman but took a quarter century to get into service. The Navy was originally supposed to buy as many as 380 Ospreys for search and rescue and antisubmarine warfare missions, but after Lehman left office, the service cut its paper requirement for V-22s to 48. The Marines are acquiring 360 Ospreys and the Air Force Special Operations Command another 50. As of March, the program office reported that 257 of a planned 460 Ospreys, including two for research, development, test and evaluation, had been acquired. Under the latest multiyear contract, which ends in fiscal 2017, the “flyaway cost” for each Osprey is about $68 million.

Until the past couple of years, Navy leaders had shown little interest in actually buying their planned 48 Ospreys. But in 2011, the Marine Corps began qualifying its MV-22s for carrier landings, and a six-day “military utility assessment” conducted last summer off the coast of Florida, in which V-22s carried passengers and cargo to and from the USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75), found that: “The V-22 demonstrated an effective, flexible, and safe capability to conduct the COD mission with no modifications and no adverse impact to cyclic flight operations.”

Navy and Marine Corps commanders of Amphibious Ready Groups carrying Marine Expeditionary Units, meanwhile, have found that using the Osprey to carry passengers and cargo among the standard ARG complement of three vessels enables the ships to conduct separate operations at ranges far greater than possible when CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters were their primary supply aircraft.

Under the Jan. 5 MOU, the first dozen HV-22s would be taken from what would have been the Marine Corps share of V-22s built in fiscal 2018-20 under the prospective third multiyear contract. Those first Navy V-22s will be replaced in the Marine Corps inventory in fiscal years 2021, 2022, and 2023 with a dozen Ospreys “that would have been allocated to the Navy,” the memo provides.

[JanMasterson]

V-22 to get a tanker option
Joshua Stewart, Staff Writer 10:37 a.m. EST December 28, 2014

[image]http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/8d08e7c45f91891d4fd484c2fe62fa1280bb6ab8/c=339-0-3886-2667&r=x404&c=534x401/local/-/media/2014/12/23/GGM/MilitaryTimes/635549308216640337-MAR-V-22-Program.jpg[/image]

"The aerial refueling capability is going to be the next thing," for the Osprey, Maj. Douglas Thumm, the plans officer for the V-22 at Headquarters Marine Corps, said.
The Osprey's tanker system is in the early stages of development and won't be ready until 2017, he said.
Giving the V-22 this new capability won't pigeon-hole the aircraft as a tanker and the Osprey will primarily be used to fly Marines and their gear. The tanker system is a piece of roll-on, roll-off equipment that will be temporarily installed on a particular aircraft, allowing it to switch between different types of missions, Thumm said.
Pictures of test flights show the system using a flexible hose, rather than a rigid boom, to connect the V-22 tanker to other aircraft.

Since it entered operations in 2007, the Corps has added an optional belly-mounted machine gun to the aircraft, and they're now trying to develop a [link=http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/military/tech/2014/11/23/armed-osprey-mv22b-weapons-marine-corps-aviation-plan/19325051/]missile system to increase the Osprey's firepower[/link].

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story/m ... /20804783/




Edit 30/12:

[image]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6HYONLCAAMZZKh.jpg[/image][image]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6HYOfiCEAAiyRG.jpg[/image]

[JanMasterson]

The jet engine of the F-35C, the naval variant of the Lightning II strike fighter, can't be transported by normal means to U.S. aircraft carriers at sea.

Pratt & Whitney's F135 jet engine can be broken up into five parts for transport, but the heaviest, the power module in its protective case and atop its special trailer, won't fit inside the Navy's C-2 Greyhound or the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey, the program office acknowledged in a response to a query from Defense News' sister publication Navy Times.

The C-2 can ferry all of the components of the F404 and F414 engines that power the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet, and frequently does so when a carrier's stock of replacement engines is depleted by regular wear and tear or mishaps such as an engine sucking in a foreign object.

"That is a huge challenge that we currently have right now," Capt. Chris Kennedy of the JSF program office said in September at the 2010 Tailhook Symposium in Reno, Nev. Kennedy, who was answering a flier's question about JSF engine resupply, said the program office is working with the Navy staff and carrier systems planners to solve the problem.

The JSF Program Office says the V-22, along with the MH-53E helicopter, can carry the F135 engine module in an external sling at least 288 miles "in good weather."

But the Navy has no fleet V-22s and has no plans to acquire them. The Marine Corps flies the MV-22, but the Navy amphibious groups that carry its forces and aircraft to distant shores generally do not operate near carrier strike groups.

One analyst, Jan van Tol of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, wondered how the Osprey would safely lower the module to the flight deck, given the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's November 2009 observation that MV-22s had buckled flight decks with their engines' exhaust heat.

The 9,400-pound module and its container also cannot be transferred from a supply ship to a carrier during an underway replenishment - when two ships are sailing side-by-side - because, Kennedy said, "It's too heavy for the unrep station."

The coming Gerald R. Ford-class carriers will have underway replenishment stations that can handle the load, Kennedy said. But the first Navy F-35 squadrons are scheduled to deploy between 2015 and 2018, when there will be one Ford-class carrier in the fleet. The second won't be commissioned until four years after the first sets sail. The current Nimitz-class carriers will dominate the fleet until the 2030s.

"You've got a very complex aircraft - and there are many, many interesting technologies in this - where it's tough enough to consider the operational and technological factors," van Tol said. "But apparently, they've not looked as carefully at second- and third-order issues."

Taken together, the problems threaten to further increase program costs and complicate immediate spending plans for the troubled F-35 program. The Navy currently plans to buy 680 F-35s, including undisclosed numbers of the -B short-takeoff-vertical-landing variant and the -C carrier variant.

The House wants to limit the number of aircraft purchased in fiscal 2011 unless certain performance milestones are met; the Senate Appropriations Committee, citing various concerns with the program, has approved a spending bill that cuts 10 of the 42 jets the Pentagon has requested.

The resupply issue likely won't add fuel to the fire still burning in some congressional circles for an alternative JSF engine made by General Electric and Rolls-Royce - one strongly opposed by the Pentagon. That engine would use the same transport container and share the transportability issues.

"The F136 would have similar dimensions and modularity," said Navy spokeswoman Capt. Cate Mueller.

Neither Pratt & Whitney nor General Electric, contacted on Friday, could comment on the engine transportability problem.

Mueller said "multiple options" for transporting spare engines to aircraft carriers are being considered in the discussions referred to by Kennedy, which also involve Marine Corps officials.

Among the options under study, she said, are "developing a low-profile engine transport system that would fit in the back of Navy and Marine aircraft; prepositioning spares on [carriers and amphibious ships]; and prepositioned spares located at forward-deployed operational areas that can be quickly transported to ships."

Officials also are evaluating "the usefulness of existing containers with the V-22, MH-53 and C-2 aircraft," she said.

A low-profile rail system would allow the engine - which by itself is not too large for the cargo doors of the COD, the MH-53E or the V-22 - or its modules to slide off the trailer and into the aircraft, Mueller said. A separate maintenance transfer trailer would be needed on the carrier for the transferred engine.

As is current practice, the military would hire commercial carriers to help transport spares to forward locations, Kennedy said.

Planners have also modeled carrier capacity to store additional engine modules, a concept he said is "one of the challenges we're working today."

Storage, even on a ship as big as a carrier, is a precious commodity, van Tol pointed out. "The storage was always at a premium, no matter how large the ship was," said van Tol, a retired Navy captain who commanded three ships, including the amphibious assault ship Essex. "Not only that, you have to be able to store it in such places that the yellow gear - the handling equipment - can actually move the engines around to where the jets are that are [having engines] replaced."

Carriers carry spares for embarked aircraft with engines that are repairable underway. A carrier typically deploys with about 35 spare, fully assembled F404 or F414 engines for its Hornets and Super Hornets, respectively, according to Lt. Aaron Kakiel, a Naval Air Forces spokesman.

All told, the program's multiple problems "increase the risk that the program will not be able to deliver the aircraft quantities and capabilities in the time required by the war fighter," GAO concluded. The Marine Corps wants initial operational capability of the JSF by 2012, with the Air Force and Navy by 2013.

However, Naval Air Systems Command said in 2009 that because of the many unresolved issues with the program, the Marine and Navy goals are "not achievable." The Pentagon's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation told GAO that it projects the initial operational testing of the full war-fighting capability of the JSF by mid-2016.

By the time initial operational capability is reached, Mueller said, the F-35C engine resupply issue "will be completely addressed."

GAO did not raise the engine transportability issue while discussing the program's logistical challenges, but it found that the Air Force faces a parallel problem: The current integrated support system for its JSF variant is limited in scope and would prohibit two detachments from one squadron simultaneously - another limitation that "will severely affect current operating practices."

At the current Pentagon estimate of $382 billion, the JSF is the military's most expensive acquisitions program. Under the Pentagon spending plan for fiscal 2011, each aircraft is projected to cost $112 million - or, when research and development costs are factored in, about $133.6 million in constant fiscal 2010 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service.
http://archive.defensenews.com/article/ ... -Ships-C-2

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V-22 Resources:
http://www.boeing.com/ospreynews/2011/i ... debook.pdf

[aaronwallace]

Most of the documents about future fleet reqs include the c-2 still so I wouldn't count it out yet.. it doesn't have the flexibility or payload of the c-2.