A CMV-22B Osprey inside a hangar at a US Navy base in San Diego, Calif. (Justin Katz/Breaking Defense.)
WEST 2025 — The three-month grounding of the Pentagon’s V-22 Osprey fleets last year had “considerable” impact on the Navy’s aviators and crews at a time when the service is transitioning to the Osprey as its primary aircraft for ferrying personnel and cargo, a deputy commodore of an Osprey squadron here in San Diego told reporters.
“VRM-30 lost two deployments [on the aircraft carriers] Teddy Roosevelt and the Lincoln,” Capt. Andrew Beard, deputy commodore of VRM-50, told reporters on Monday ahead of the West 2025 exposition. “You had pilots and air crewmen who were banking on going away, getting lots of experience [and] getting qualified … Instead of doing that, they sat here and couldn’t train, they couldn’t fly,” he continued.
VRM-30 is the Navy’s first CMV-22B Osprey squadron as the service transitions away from the legacy C-2A Greyhounds. VRM-50 is a fleet replacement squadron focused on training new aviators and enlisted crews to operate the Osprey.
Beard compared the situation to when an individual is sidelined for an extended period of time due to a medical incident, losing training time and flight hours as a result. The difference, Beard said, is that the squadron can mitigate that risk by pairing them with more senior personnel who can monitor them.
But due to the fleet-wide grounding, even senior personnel had to spend time getting back up to the standard while junior crewmen had to continue waiting their turns to be cycled back into operations.
“I would say some of the junior folks probably didn’t fly in an aircraft for about five months. That’s considerable — due to no fault of their own,” Beard said.
The CMV-22B is the Navy’s variant of the V-22 Osprey, which is also flown by the US Air Force, Marine Corps and the Japanese military. The aircraft focuses on cargo and personnel transportation. (One naval aviator at the squadron here in San Diego was sporting a patch on his flight suit resembling the US Postal Service’s icon, a symbol acknowledging that the C-2A Greyhounds — and now CMV-22Bs — have historically delivered the mail to sailors deployed.)
But the fleet has been dealing with a series of safety pauses going back to August 2022. The longest downtime, the roughly three-month pause Beard discussed, followed a November 2023 crash off the coast of Japan that killed eight airmen.
After the most recent issue in December, Naval Air Systems Command cleared the V-22 fleets to continue flight operations under specific restrictions which were put in place following a brief pause implemented earlier that month.
At that time, NAVAIR said a predetermined flight hour threshold for the aircraft’s gearbox would determine how it could operate, specifically the restriction implied newer gearboxes were more susceptible to problems. But the command decline to disclose a specific number for that threshold.
While speaking to reporters, Beard said his aircraft are divided into two fleets: those with gearboxes under 400 flights hour and those above 400 flight hours. While not specifically describing the 400 hour mark as NAVAIR’s guidance, that number matches the description given to Breaking Defense previously that the issue is most prevalent in newer V-22s.
A spokesperson for NAVAIR declined to comment when asked about Beard’s comments.
“Right now, our primary focus is on getting the [detachments] formed [and supporting] the carrier schedule. And we are keenly focused on that, on doing that,” Beard said. “That has become a challenge because of the recent interim flight clearance and the restrictions based on the gearboxes that are going on.”
One of the restrictions in place under the interim flight clearance includes never being further than 30 minutes from a landing area. That poses particularly difficult challenges for the Navy, which operates its Ospreys over blue water ocean, compared to the Marines and Air Force who are usually closer to shore.
Beard said the detachment currently aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) is unable to fly on certain days based on where the carrier is in the western pacific. But he also said that flight crews ultimately have some leeway to act as they see fit if circumstances demand it.
“All of our crews know and train to if there’s — if you’re in extremis and there’s a rock and it’s flat. Get it done,” he said.
