Marine Corps Osprey lands on Australian warship 3 months after flight ban was lifted
An MV-22 Osprey touched down on an Australian warship last week, another indicator the tiltrotor is returning to routine service with the Marine Corps after a series of deadly crashes.
The U.S. military grounded its fleet of about 400 Ospreys between Dec. 6 and March 8 as it investigated the Nov. 29 crash of an Air Force CV-22 Osprey that killed eight airmen off Japan’s southern coast. An Osprey assigned to last year’s Marine rotational force crashed in August north of Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, killing three Marines and injuring 20 others, three seriously. The Osprey has been plagued by a problem called hard clutch engagement that caused loss of control in some instances and was blamed for the deaths of five Marines in a June 2022 Osprey crash in California.
After the November crash, the Marines put their Ospreys in the air again less than a week after Naval Air Systems Command cleared them for flight on March 8.
